Here Let's Not Go Again
by Laryna6
Summary: So, what should we do this timeline? We could start a rock band, or I could master another form of cookery. What, you want to end the reboots by saving the world? Why would we ever want to do that? Please tell me you're kidding. Come on, let's go stage a jailbreak. Shinji/Kaworu.
1. Impenetrable Barrier

_Since someone was kind enough to point out in a review that I didn't make this clear enough, this fic will be in the context of the manga, anime and Rebuild, so **assume spoilers for everything**!_

_This presumes that manga timeline's first, before anime and Rebuild. _

_Manga!Kaworu does not like Lilim, and for good reasons. If he decided to start the time loops, it would be because of Shinji. __Over centuries of meeting people who weren't SEELE, though, he'd get to change his mind about us and become the anime version. Anime!Kaworu is actually the person who thinks most highly of the human race and its potential in the series. _

_On the other hand, Shinji also changes between manga, anime and Rebuild. In the manga he 'has more of a spine' as certain fans would put it. After who knows how many failure timelines that he doesn't remember, there's anime!Shinji, who is certainly a hero who wants to save the world. __As for Rebuild!Shinji, he's honestly less heroic than anime!Shinji, more willing to just walk off and leave other people in the lurch. _

_When Kaworu is doing all this for Shinji's sake, and he fell in love with Shinji's compassion… The trouble is that by prioritizing Shinji's happiness over everything else, he's been acting as an enabler. _

_Something that's shaping this fic on a meta level is commentary on Eva fic as a whole. If you're aware of the whole 'badass Shinji' nonsense that's contaminated far too large a percentage of English language Eva fic, then feel free to skip the rant. _

_A lot of fics have 'badass Shinji,' where Shinji is more willing to kill, more selfish, more willing to use others, etc. Where his approach to people is kill/get in his harem/ignore since they're not as important as he is, except for the sake of comic relief/an audience to say how awesome he is._

_Based not on how an actual fourteen-year-old would act, which is what Anno was going for, but for how someone older (the English dub of the anime really screwed up by getting an adult to do Shinji's voice, it tilted people's perception of what age he was and what standards he should be held to) would act not in a real world full of real people, _but a fictional world full of people who aren't real_. Not 'how Shinji would act,' but the wish-fulfillment/Blank Protagonist otaku fantasy Anno hated of 'how I would act, and of course I'd be awesome and fix everything because anime and video games tell me so.' _

_This Shinji knows that the people around him are real, but the Shinji in the anime and manga fought not for the world as a whole, but the people he cared about. The reboots mean that no matter what, the people he cares about are going to be fine, and honestly, Kaworu has been enabling him. _

_Here we have a Shinji with tons more knowledge than regular Shinji, and more power (same way Gendo got his in the manga) but no, acting more like a 'proper' video game/anime character does _not _make him a better person, despite what all the people who think Shinji should grow a spine say, and make it easy for him to save the world radiating pure awesome. Instead of making it solve all his problems, it actually puts him in danger of losing the bond to another person that is the real source of power. A character like most Gary Stu Shinjis would be made of fail and far less effective than anime!Shinji._

_Most Kaworu/Shinji fic is obviously based on how he acts in the episode where he met Kaworu, which is the point at which the character is at his most vulnerable and doesn't quite reflect how he is over the rest of the series. This fic is based more on a manga version, who had told himself that the reboots mean the people he fought to protect will all be okay, so it's okay to be free and do what he wants. The trouble is that when humans stop actively trying to be good people, that's really all it takes to become bad people. Not in the sense of evil, but in the sense of that gray selfishness. _

_Yes: for Shinji to act the way a lot of the Fan Dumb says he should act is _moral decay_ that makes him a _worse person_ and will _not _help him save the world. Overcoming his issues and reaching out to people is the only way, despite the fact this is damn hard. 'The Eva will not save you, otaku fantasies are just fantasies, there is no easy way out and trying to insist there is one will only lead to death and failure.'_

_If you don't know the fics I'm commenting on you're lucky, but even a lot of the better Eva fics like 'Nobody Dies' (worth reading if you can tolerate the massive OOC for the sake of humor and the fact that version of Kaworu has absolutely no resemblance to any of the canon variants of Kaworu) have traces of this attitude about how the series challenges 'should' be approached. The preoccupation with sex, etc. in this fic are common tropes in that kind of fic._

_For Shinji to act the way people say he 'should' act would be a bad thing that would need to be fixed before he could save the world, not something that would make it easy for him to save the world._

* * *

Sounds. Loud noises. Not just the guards patrolling, but bangs and shouting. Shouting. Words.

She flinched, not hard enough to send the chair inching along the floor (they'd bolted it down) when she felt someone in the room with her. The door hadn't opened, she was sure of it.

A hand touched her hair, and they didn't touch her except when she was dragged to the bathroom, or when she was taken and roughly washed once a week.

"It's alright, Misato Katsuragi." She didn't understand the words, but she heard the reassurance in the tone, the way she'd heard people talk to animals and very small children, long ago. How long ago? How many years ago?

Her captors didn't bother with that now.

The person who stepped around the chair, into her sight, wasn't wearing a uniform. He sighed, touching the bonds that held her, and Misato flinched as each one released. They didn't remove her bonds, they just unbuckled them from the chair. What was happening?

He smiled at her, then sighed as there were more loud noises in the distance. "He knows that isn't necessary… He does it because he is angry for your sake, and it used to make me happy when he killed my own captors for me, but…" He touched her cheek, and the gag fell away. He wrapped his arms around her, lifting her up.

She tried to kick at him, because this could not possibly be anything good, good things didn't happen, but her kick and even her knee just skidded away somehow. She could get purchase on him when she leaned against him, but her blows just didn't connect. Screaming her frustration, she paused when she realized that she wasn't gagged.

Don't hope. She'd learned not to hope. So she took that as an opportunity to try to bite his ear off, as he walked towards the door.

There was some kind of pale light blocking her teeth, she saw, as the man walked towards the door. He stopped there for a moment as the electronic locks opened.

Shouts of surprise, outrage and alarm? Were her guards scared of this man, or surprised he was here? Or were they just angry Misato was out of the room? Was this unauthorized?

That pale light blocked the man that charged at him, and the bullets when the other guard fired. The pale-haired man carrying Misato didn't even pause. "Now, let's see… I suppose I should follow the screaming."

That light punched through the doors of the shaft, and it was when he stepped out into it and started floating that Misato realized that oh, this was another dream. She was pretty sure it wasn't because normally she didn't feel held in dreams, and she could smell that one of the guards had pissed their pants (served them right, after all the times she was just left there), but if they were flying this was definitely a dream.

"Here," he said, three floors up, and batted another of the reinforced elevator doors aside. He leaned his head against Misato's a bit, and adjusted her so that it was easier for her to rest her head on his shoulder. Instead of walking along the floor now that there was a floor he kept floating, closer and closer to the loud noises. He floated right past several of the guards who were using one of the ID card gates as shelter to fire from behind. "Dear… is this really necessary?" he asked, hovering above the bloodstained floor.

"What do you care?" the brown-haired man responded, irritated. "Do you think she'd rather kill them herself? Anyway, we both know that if I don't kill all the guards, SEELE will decide that now that this facility's security's been compromised they'll have the remaining guards kill all the prisoners. I need to do a clean sweep of this place… Oh, right, you're complaining about this because that'll take too long. I guess it won't make any difference to leave the rest of them."

"That isn't it, but…" Misato felt the warm chest she rested against lift and fall as the man sighed. "Do as you like, dear."

The other man nodded, reloading one of his guns. "Now get out of the way, you're blocking my line of fire."

"Yes." The red-eyed man who held Misato shifted to the side, floating closer to one of the walls. The guards took that chance to try to fire at the one who was shooting at them, but the brunet almost idly raised his own left hand, conjuring up his own wall of light, and only lowered that shield to return fire in the instants no one was firing at him.

"Should I take her home?" the pale one wondered, stroking Misato's hair and looking down at her instead of at the battle.

"Oh no you don't," his companion said over the bullets. "If I let you adopt one of them you adopt all of them. I don't mind the stray cats, but Lilim are different. Put her in that TV station like last time."

"Yes, dear." The pale man nodded, and floated backward into darkness that appeared where the wall used to be?

If this was a dream, then it wasn't that weird to float through darkness and end up in a place with so many lights and people that after being locked up in the silence Misato couldn't take it and she started screaming and kicking again. The people wouldn't stop talking and shining lights and making noises. The pale man made noises back, but he also held Misato, rocking her a bit, and stayed until all the excitement and stimuli from long ago tired her out (like a baby, a child reduced to a baby that couldn't speak) and she was put into what had to be a _bed_.

"…How I wonder what you are? Up above the world so high…" A warm hand on her forehead was the last thing she knew, humming sounds that resolved themselves into _words_ that slipped into her dreams.

When she woke up, she lay there, trying to process that these were blankets, not bonds, until someone peeked into the room. "Is she awake yet?" she heard someone else ask from behind the door.

"Yes," she answered, and raised a hand to her lips, startled.

As a woman came in the door, Misato Katsuragi stared at that hand. Because she could move it. She could move. She could speak.

She was… free?

* * *

"The uproar that began when two vigilantes raided a secret prison complex kept by the UN Committee for Human Instrumentality shows no signs of dying down. One of them used a force field technology known as the 'AT Field' to eliminate all the guards and escort almost all the prisoners to a German military base unaffiliated with the UN forces before vanishing, while the other appeared using some kind of portal in a Tokyo-2 television studio with Misato Katsuragi, the only survivor of the Katsuragi expedition. The second man told the news studio that documents would be released online substantiating the claims made by the prisoners, although he refused to give further details and seemed primarily concerned with Misato Katsuragi, who had been reduced to near-infancy by years of solitary confinement. Two days after Miss Katsuragi miraculously recovered enough to give testimony, substantiated by the reports of the other prisoners, the rate at which new secrets are being uncovered and crimes by the 'SEELE' cult revealed shows no signs of slowing down."

"As strange as it seems – although what about all this hasn't been out of a science fiction novel – people are speculating that the two men involved in the original jailbreak may be the missing Shinji Ikari, who was abandoned at a railway station by his father Gendo Ikari two days prior, and the 'angel' created by SEELE by inserting human DNA into the so-called 'Adam' entity at the South Pole. Although there are few recent pictures of the young Shinji Ikari, SEELE had extensive footage of their creation Tabris. Playing that alongside footage recorded in Tokyo-2, the resemblance is clear."

"It might be possible for something like that to age twenty years in a day," the other anchor responded, "but just rapidly aging a child that young won't give them the tactics and skills of a trained soldier, which the Lone Gunman demonstrated during the raid. The mother of Shinji Ikari, Yui Ikari, was the daughter of Lorenz Keel, a key figure in the cult. It's possible that the Lone Gunman was another member of the family who may have recruited the angel for help bringing down the cult. Others are suggesting time travel."

"The world wants to know…"

"Why are you listening to that," was what Shinji wanted to know. "So much for bumming around Europe playing music for our supper this timeline."

"We don't need to use our real faces?" Kaworu suggested.

"I like your real face." Shinji frowned up at him from the couch. "This is ten timelines in a row that you've rescued Misato, and I get that we have to bring down SEELE if we rescue her since otherwise they'll just recapture her again, but it's getting to be a headache."

"I'm sorry."

"That's not what I wanted to hear from you," Shinji said, standing up and stretching. "It makes sense to get your revenge on the old men, but you're not interested in that anymore. You look uncomfortable when I shoot people: what happened to my Kaworu, the one who killed a kitten and just watched what happened to Asuka? Come on, it's not like they won't all die in ten years anyway." He pushed his hair back with the gloved hand: eating what was left of Adam the way Gendo Ikari would not only kept it out of SEELE and Gendo's hands, but let Shinji generate an AT field, which was all kinds of useful and meant he didn't need Kaworu acting as White Mage if he wanted to take on private armies. Not with shielding capability and regen of his own. The eye on his palm was still creepy but it never hurt – Kaworu had Adam's soul and liked Shinji better than he did Gendo, of course.

Without SEELE pushing NERV, and with almost all of GEHIRN imprisoned for crimes against humanity? With people knowing that the Evas were doomsday machines? Either one of the angels would reach Lilith and bring about Third Impact first, or Kaworu's mind would be overtaken by Adam's and he'd do it himself.

"I loved you for your kindness," Kaworu said quietly. "It's strange that now watching Lilim suffer worries me, while you…" Could kill them so casually. "Have I contaminated you? Does it have something to do with how I restore your memories each incarnation?"

"I'm just getting callous," Shinji said, then realized that was a bad thing, not something reassuring. "Like the old men… I mean, you can only watch the world end so many times before you realize it's not a big deal? Everyone will be alive again next timeline."

"But they can still suffer _now_," Kaworu said. "You used to be the one to argue with me, threaten that you wouldn't talk to me if I didn't go rescue Misato." He let Shinji pull him back down onto the couch. "Now I plead with you to do it." His lips opened with the grace of long practice, of familiarity as Shinji bent down to kiss him. "It made me realize how I've changed."

"It's been thousands of years for you, and a few hundred for me," Shinji pointed out: he knew Kaworu hadn't started copying Shinji's memories until he'd finally learned how to get along with Shinji, and at first it was because that let Kaworu skip the awkward period where he had to make Shinji like him. It was fun to coax stories out of Kaworu about all the embarrassing blunders he'd made in the first few dozen timelines.

"I was a terrible person, wasn't I?" Kaworu asked, looking up at him with sad eyes. "Just killing a poor little kitten…"

"Kaworu…" Don't be stupid, was what Shinji wanted to say. Or, 'dammit, not the kitten story again.' "You're the kindest person I know. The kindest person on this planet." He paused. "Doesn't this movie about that end when the main character becomes a better person? Do I need to corrupt you, or something?"

"Don't you want this to end?" Kaworu wondered.

Shinji stared at him. "No, I like being alive. You're not… you're not thinking of stopping the reboots and letting everyone stay dead, are you?" No way.

"No, but don't you want to save the world? Wasn't that what you fought for?" Back then. Originally.

How many times had Kaworu let events play out just like the first time until he got to when he could meet Shinji and try to make Shinji love him? Shinji's first memories were from a time like that, so he could say, "No, I wanted to get my father and everyone else to like me. Me, save the world? Up against _him _and SEELE?" No way. "There's no way to save the world, remember? Say that I theoretically killed you, which is _not happening_," the thought scared him, because if Kaworu didn't give the next timeline's Shinji his memories back, "your soul will just end up somewhere else, and without a mind it'll act on instinct and cause Third Impact anyway. It's just not possible for humanity to survive, so the only thing you can do is keep bringing it back, okay?" He laughed. "What, is this about wanting to delay the end for the sake of the next book in some series? You and your romance novels. And sappy dramas."

"The first time, when you stayed in my room… You were the one who introduced me to soap operas," Kaworu said in his own defense.

"I know, you've made me watch that episode way too many times." Kaworu went and swiped a copy as soon as it was made every timeline. Shinji didn't mind too much. Sure, he wanted to know what the hell had past-him been thinking to watch drivel like that, but it made Kaworu nostalgic and affectionate and it was easy to spend the entire episode doing stuff much better than _watching _it.

Kaworu had given Shinji Kaworu's memory of that day, of their first kiss, but Shinji didn't want to think about it. Feeling how Kaworu had been tied up inside, looking at Shinji and longing for something he had never experienced for himself? Wanting so much and knowing it was probably impossible because Lilim were cruel and Shinji hated him?

It hurt more because even though Shinji had his memories restored every timeline, Kaworu couldn't do that until his Lilim brain had developed well enough for him to think and plan well enough he probably wouldn't screw it up. Tampering with memories was tricky, and it was harder for two-year-olds to deal with frustration without doing things like screaming and blowing up Switzerland.

So every timeline, Shinji had four or so years of being with his parents. Of being a pathetic child who wanted to be loved, not knowing that his parents were, respectively, a sociopath who wanted to destroy the world in order to achieve godhood and Gendo Ikari.

Kaworu always came to get him on the day he was abandoned. It would be better for Kaworu to wait until he was older, but he couldn't stand to think about Shinji crying alone and abandoned on that platform.

His angel arriving before Gendo Ikari left used to end with the bastard splattered across a couple kilometers of train tracks, and that would traumatize a Shinji who didn't know that he should be clapping instead of screaming.

Eleven years of living together happily, four years of being a little boy, eleven more years of being happy and loved: that was the pattern. At least Yui Ikari trying to make sure he loved her was a little better than Kaworu got. Bastards mostly kept him in tubes and on lab tables.

It was hard for Shinji to stop hating Gendo and Yui when every timeline he was reminded of why he hated them. He didn't understand how Kaworu's feelings towards SEELE had cooled to contempt when every time he got to experience them treating him like a thing, planning his death.

It made Shinji wish he'd hunted them down first instead of going after Misato, but Kaworu'd asked him to… wait, "Did you nag me to go after Misato first so it would be just too inconvenient to kill all the SEELE bastards myself?" he demanded.

Kaworu didn't last a second before cracking. "Yes," he admitted.

Shinji sighed. "Do you think I'm… Look, I'm perfectly capable of not killing people! I'll go a whole timeline without killing anyone… next timeline." He frowned. "Are you thinking like the old men again? I know it was six days ago for you that you were hearing them talk about how 'the Lilim are so evil and don't deserve to exist, be a messiah and save us by killing us all,' that bullshit. I took those people out because I had prisoners to evacuate! You know how many people have to be carried out of that hellhole! It's not like I like killing people."

"In how many timelines has the first thing you wanted to do been to kill your father with a knife, or blow up Unit 01 in front of him," far worse than killing him, for him to see what was left of Yui go up in smoke and chunks of burnt flesh. "I know that you're not like that all the time, Shinji. You usually get most of the violence out of your system after the first week." Partially because Shinji had gotten very good at finding his targets and killing them within a week or so. No wonder he'd realized that Kaworu had asked to save Misato first in order to screw up Shinji's schedule. Once SEELE were in UN custody, Shinji didn't so much mind watching the world take its vengeance on them, even if there were rules against torture.

"Oh," Shinji said thoughtfully. "Let's drag Mom out of Unit 01 and hand her over so she can stand trial too. Would you mind testifying? My dad was practically frothing at the mouth that one time," when the angel kept saying that Yui never loved him, that she wasn't capable of it.

"I don't want to be a hero," Kaworu said bluntly. "Not when…" He could protect them from the rest of the angels, but eventually he'd lose control and cause Third Impact himself. He didn't want people to put their faith in him and be betrayed, he didn't want to feel like SEELE.

"I'm sorry," Shinji apologized. "I should have known that time was a horrible idea. We should wear masks next time we rescue Misato."

"No, you should have been recognized as the one who protected the world all those timelines where you fought for it," so Kaworu didn't mind Shinji spending one timeline being worshipped, he just objected to being dragged into that himself because it wasn't like he was going to avoid Shinji for an entire timeline.

Not Shinji's angel, the Lilim thought, fingers buried in Kaworu's hair, clutching at his scalp for a moment. "So, what should we do this timeline? After I'm done with my vengeance. If hitchhiking and playing music in town squares for people to toss money into a cap again is out, then what?"

"What would you like?" Kaworu asked.

"I asked you first." Shinji frowned. Kaworu's devotion to him was real, and nice, but he had a tendency to go 'whatever you say, dear' and leave too many decisions up to Shinji, when sometimes Shinji wanted help coming up with ideas or something. Maybe it was a legacy of offending Shinji and getting rejected in too many timelines. "Look, you know I'll never leave you, right? And if I do, you can just not give me the memories of that timeline next time, so I forget whatever made me leave you. Not that that will happen!" he said hurriedly, when Kaworu looked frightened at the prospect of Shinji doing that. Or was he hurt that Shinji thought he would do that?

Shinji trusted Kaworu when he said that the only reason Shinji didn't have the memories of every timeline was because in the ones at the beginning Kaworu hadn't known how to copy memories like that, and in the process of experimenting (on disposable Lilim who weren't Shinji) he'd found that Lilim got upset about people poking around in their heads and messing with their memories without permission, so he'd started copying with the first Shinji who said yes.

Kaworu sucked at lying. Who knew how many timelines, and he still sucked at lying. Even though he had a Lilim brain, deceit just really didn't compute for him, which gave Shinji a lot of advantages in this relationship that he tried not to abuse too much. It was just too easy, when Kaworu kept taking Shinji seriously when he said that he would be really angry at him, angry enough not to speak to him for _years, _unless Kaworu did whatever Shinji wanted.

Come on, that was obviously lies.

For one thing, he really did love Kaworu, even if he didn't like that Kaworu was maturing from someone who just did whatever he wanted and didn't care into a bleeding heart who worried about Shinji killing _minions of SEELE_, of all people.

Shinji had to do something about this, or who knew what might happen? Kaworu might start getting in the way when Shinji wanted to kill Gendo?

Kaworu might stop loving him?

No, no, that thought was absolutely ridiculous. Kaworu loving Shinji enough to just let Shinji kill him was in the prophecies. Kaworu would lay down his life for Shinji without hesitating, love Shinji even as Shinji killed him, so of course he wouldn't stop loving him over Shinji killing someone else, some bastards who didn't deserve to live. Right?

"I'll try to learn Brazilian cooking," Shinji suggested. He'd mastered most cuisines, but the Amazon river floodplains were devastated in Second Impact. He'd need to do some looking to find a surviving chef of a skill level worth Shinji's time to teach him, although Kaworu's ability to fiddle with computer systems meant money was no object. "And you can garden and read your," Shinji stopped himself from saying 'stupid' "romance novels, and maybe we'll learn another instrument. Maybe we'll join a rock band next timeline." Kaworu liked being poor wandering minstrels, walking around exploring Europe or wherever and finding places they'd never been and meeting interesting people.

Maybe it had something to do with his healing factor, or how things like heat and cold didn't really bother him. Shinji preferred having a roof over his head to pitching tents with the cold rain already pouring down on them, no matter how willing Kaworu was to warm him up afterwards.

Sure, he liked knowing he could fend for himself: that was part of why he liked to cook (he ignored the part of him that said he'd learned to cook because it was something people would praise and appreciate him for), but just because he could handle camping didn't mean he wanted to do it all the time.

He'd considered taking up hunting once, but one look at Kaworu made him realize that was a terrible idea.

That darn cat… It was fine to kill animals if they were just going to die painfully otherwise, but Kaworu had some guilt complex about it because of how he'd thought Shinji hated him for it Even Kaworu recognized that killing Lilim who were shooting at you was justifiable. Animals, though, couldn't fight back against someone with a gun.

Shinji remembered learning how to cook vegetarian for Rei, but Kaworu wasn't vegetarian and Shinji wanted him to stay that way. If Kaworu kept becoming more and more of a bleeding heart, then watching animals killed in front of him might make him go vegan or something, and then what would Shinji do? Cooking just for himself was _boring_.

Kaworu was happy to eat whatever Shinji made him, but…

'_I loved you for your kindness_,' Shinji suddenly realized. That was what Kaworu had said. Loved. Past tense.

Was Kaworu just saying that was why he'd fallen in love with Shinji, because Shinji cared about animals like that cat and bitches like Asuka and then there was Rei, who had a damn AT field and could have shielded herself from the blast instead of making Shinji have to watch her die knowing that she was doing it to protect _him _from Armisael?

Or was it past tense because Shinji wasn't kind anymore?

Or was it a Freudian slip?

Kaworu was changing, and Shinji was changing: people grew apart.

"Kaworu?" Shinji asked, looking down at the most powerful being on the planet.

"Yes, dear?"

"Why do you love me?" Why was Shinji the only person in the world who got to keep his memories of other timelines? Why was he the one Kaworu loved, out of everyone on the planet? Why was he the one who got to command a being with the power of a god?

Kaworu smiled to himself, closing his eyes to look at memories. Instead of looking at the Shinji who was here with him, right now. "Your kindness. Your heart that broke when you saw others suffer. You were everything SEELE was not."

Shinji _was _the opposite of SEELE? Past tense again?

"They said that Lilim didn't care about anyone else, but you did. You, in the end you even cared enough for me to grant me mercy," Kaworu said, looking up at him now with adoring eyes at the Shinji who had cupped his hands around Kaworu and squeezed him to death, and Shinji suddenly realized that was probably the first time Kaworu had ever felt anything even a bit like being hugged. "Armisael connected me to Rei before that, and in her memories I saw how you tried to reach out to, how you had kindness even for something inhuman like her. Like me. You proved them wrong. You made me realize that there was something worth preserving in this world."

Shinji looked at those red eyes and wanted to run away from his reflection there. "Kaworu, I… I couldn't save anyone. That time and all the other times I just played right into their hands. I'd kill you, and then let them use me to start Third Impact themselves. I'm, I'm no hero." It wasn't that he minded rescuing Misato. He liked Misato. She'd tried to be a good mentor to him, and even if objectively she'd sucked trying made her a thousand times better than either of his biological parents.

"You are," Kaworu told him. "The light of your soul: it's beautiful."

Shinji didn't say that if he wasn't kind anymore and the light of his soul hadn't changed, then it didn't have anything to do with his personality and he didn't see the difference between liking someone because their soul was shiny and because they had a nice pair of tits. So was Kaworu prophesized to fall for Shinji because Shinji's soul was his type or something?

What if Shinji's soul did start growing ugly, though? If Shinji grew cruel, and Kaworu saw someone with a pretty young soul that wasn't stained by centuries of ignoring human suffering so he could have a good time. What kind of person didn't even try to save the world, even if he did know that Kaworu could just reset everything to the moment of Second Impact and bring them all back anyway?

Except at the beginning, Kaworu hadn't liked Lilim. Shinji was the reason he'd first realized that SEELE was wrong about them, Shinji was the one who had helped him learn about music, the one who turned on a soap opera when a young, impressionable Kaworu was in the room. Kaworu started reading romance novels in hopes of learning Lilim courtship rituals so he could figure out where he was going wrong and how to make Shinji love him back. Practically everything Kaworu did, everything he loved, could be traced back to Shinji in some way.

If Kaworu stopped loving Shinji, if Shinji no longer disproved SEELE's thesis that Lilim were evil and shouldn't exist, then would Kaworu stop rewinding time?

To see Shinji again: that was why he did it. Would he still do it if he had to see Shinji and know how far Shinji had fallen? If it made him ache for what was lost? Or would he finally move on? Fill a dead earth with his own children and let time begin to flow again?

If Shinji didn't become a better person, if Shinji didn't _stay _a good enough person to give Kaworu reason to do this, then Shinji would die and stay dead. Everyone would die and stay dead. The reboots weren't something that just happened, they were something Kaworu did. For him. Overcoming his instincts and giving the world back to the Lilim.

For Shinji.

Was this how Kaworu felt when Shinji played the 'I'll stop loving you if you don't do what I want' card? This panic that he was about to lose the most important thing of all, the one person to ever love him unselfishly?

He closed his eyes, feeling a sense of defeat he hadn't known since he'd finally managed to give up and admit that never, in any timeline, was he ever going to be able to make his father love him. "We'll have to let the next timeline go normally." To refresh Shinji's memories of what happened, what the threats were. "Don't just copy my memories: we should get Misato, Kaji, Rei and I guess Asuka," she was a genius, after all, even if it got harder for him to tolerate her 'I must be better than everyone else' attitude every timeline.

Especially after a few timelines where Shinji met her with an adult identity and she'd crushed on him like Kaji, trying to get the older man to see her as an adult so she could feel validated? Even telling her that he was married didn't work any more than Kaji's obvious disinterest had.

Asuka was a brat, but maybe, over enough timelines, if she lived long enough, she'd grow up. "Then, next reboot, you can give them all those memories and we'll see how it goes." How long it took the others to be useful, especially since Misato was going to equate Kaworu with Adam and Shinji wasn't going to trust any plan she'd had anything to do with until he was sure she wasn't prioritizing making his Kaworu permanently dead over humanity's survival. Without Kaworu, they'd all _stay dead_.

"What about Dr. Akagi?" Kaworu wondered.

"You're just suggesting her because you both like cats…" Cat people. "Sure, she does know the science, I guess." And having her memories of things like being sent to SEELE naked for those old perverts to gawk at her the way they'd kept Kaworu naked all the time restored at an opportune moment would let Shinji turn her against Gendo. Wait. Shinji gave Kaworu a suspicious look. "You will restore my memories before I kill you, right?" In the very first timeline Shinji remembered with his own memories instead of looking through Kaworu's eyes, Kaworu had asked Shinji to kill him as proof that Kaworu hadn't just tried to get Shinji to fall in love with him so that Shinji would betray humanity by not killing the angel.

Also probably because exterminating Shinji's species himself was no way to reward Shinji for being kind enough to finally accept Kaworu's feelings.

"But SEELE and Gendo Ikari won't reveal their true plans until the last angel is dead," Kaworu pointed out.

"It's one thing to kill you if I know you're going to come back to life," Shinji said heatedly, "but…"

"Don't worry," Kaworu said. "It took a lot of work to make you fall in love with me. I won't come to NERV until right before I'm supposed to attack, and I'll just not seduce you." So Shinji wouldn't mind killing Kaworu, not if he hated him.

"…This is sounding worse and worse," Shinji said, blanching. "You mean I'm going to spend the whole next timeline _celibate_?" Why would anyone possibly want to be a hero and save the world, again?

Well, he'd try to be nicer, he promised himself even if he wouldn't consciously remember that promise next timeline.

A phrase came to mind: 'I'll try being nicer if you'll try being smarter.' Not likely.


	2. Absolute Territory

_Early chapter as thanks for all the feedback. Telling people to expect psychological horror in an Eva fic feels like telling people to expect giant robots and alien angels when those are hallmarks of the canon. Really, psychological horror is a more central part of the NGE experience than the iconic Evangelions: we all know the Evangelions are just high-tech nightmare fuel delivery systems. Built to break down the barriers that protect people's psyches from the crazy. _

_Eva isn't Eva without crazy, messed-up stuff and toxic relationships._

_Manga!Kaworu is an exceptionally good kid for someone raised without any social graces by a crazy death cult that thinks compassion is a curse on the Lilim. __Still, the less you think of manga!Kaworu, the more impressive a change it would be to go from that to anime!Kaworu. Really, I see them as the same character, the only difference is that anime!Kaworu knows what the hell he's doing, knows what not to say and how to express care._

_And anime!Kaworu is 'such a good person that just meeting him was going to give Shinji a complex' according to Anno. _

_That's part of why Kaworu didn't catch on to Shinji's decay for so long: he thinks of himself as someone who isn't a very good person. Morality is like wisdom: the wiser someone is, the more aware they are of how little they know. The better a person is, the more aware they are that they have moral failings that they personally need to work on before they have any right to try to tell other people how to be, because being a good person is hard and you need to work at it. Anyone who assumes that they are a good person is a bad person._

_While true love is a nice idea in theory, relying on one person as your moral compass, the one who fulfills all your emotional needs is a very, very bad idea._

_That was the relationship between Gendo Ikari and Yui Ikari. Being chosen and loved by such a 'good person:' look what it did to him. _

_If Kaworu had a healthy ego, he wouldn't have assumed that of course Shinji wouldn't fall in love with him unless Kaworu bent over backwards making an effort._

* * *

Every single timeline he came back to himself remembering being such a weak kid and trying to promise himself that he wouldn't be that weak, wouldn't break that easily for his parent's pleasure again, but this? Far worse than fourteen years of being so embarrassingly weak, the memory of grasping Kaworu in only one hand, crunching him in a motion that was more a spasm than anything like accepting Kaworu's wish? "I won't fall in love with you, huh? It won't hurt when I kill you, huh?" Shinji demanded, feeling sick and angry and praying that anger won.

"I'm sorry," Kaworu said, and clearly meant it. "You were so miserable that I wanted to comfort you, and you always used to hate me…"

"That was when you…" Were stumbling around like a half-grown kitten, clawing at things without realizing that hurt and making messes everywhere. The Kaworu who knew how to get close to Shinji and make him feel loved without scaring him away was so different from the Kaworu who had randomly said incredibly insulting stuff because he didn't have any clue why Shinji would possibly be pissed off by this. "Weren't so damn wonderful! I nearly drowned myself the day after you died! You left me so broken that I…" Shinji turned away from Kaworu to bang his head against the wall of the SEELE safehouse Kaworu always brought Shinji to in order to restore his memories.

The instrumentality swirled together everyone's minds, and Kaworu's soul had been in there, temporarily rendered mindless by his body's death. Since Kaworu's soul was always drawn to Shinji, some of Shinji's memories from after Kaworu made his copy of them had ended up in Kaworu's mind thanks, or rather no thanks, to the instrumentality.

Shinji should probably be happy he had a lot more knowledge of what they were up against than he'd thought they'd get, but had he really jerked off over Asuka? She was fourteen! Sure, Shinji had been only fourteen at the time, and going insane just the way all those bastards planned, but…

He was just glad that Kaworu was willing to wrap his arms around Shinji, that he wasn't disgusted enough to reject him. It wasn't as though jerking off looking at what amounted to a doll when he didn't remember that he was married counted as cheating, but Shinji almost wished that Kaworu would punch him for that. Or _someone _would, since he felt like a damn creepy old man.

Wait, was this like Gendo Ikari perving over Rei?

Hell, he was turning into his father!

Shinji hit his head on the wall again and again until Kaworu pulled him away. "Don't worry, I was just doing that for Asuka's sake," he said, tilting his head back to rest it on Kaworu's shoulder, his husband's arms wrapped around his chest.

"If I restore all her memories, don't worry, she'll do that for you."

Shinji perked up. "True!" He still shuddered, because now he retroactively deserved every time she'd beaten him and called him a pervert. "Is it just me, or was Asuka worse this time?"

"I hope it wasn't my fault… Her mother compared her not just to the other woman's child, but to me. SEELE saw Asuka as the control group, an optimal Lilim they could measure my progress against. The better I performed, the more Asuka would have suffered by comparison."

"Has that ever happened before?" Shinji wanted to know. "The entire human race getting the ability to come back as many times as we want, but no other life forms coming back." With no food or oxygen being produced before long everyone who came back to life would just die, so Kaworu had to rewind time again.

Kaworu shook his head.

"I guess that chaos theory says that even if you're the only one that has their memories, things will still change."

"I'm not the only one who changed," Kaworu told him. "Even though none of the Lilim consciously remember, you are all evolving slowly over time. Gendo Ikari changed the most."

"What? Why?" Shinji wanted to know…"Because I've been making sure that he dies or suffers in every timeline," he knew. "So my dad hasn't just been repeating the same basic thing over and over." Hell. Gendo was already dangerous, so anything that made him more dangerous?

Kaworu nodding wasn't a good sign. "The members of SEELE also changed. Not as much as Gendo Ikari: they are set in their ways, closed to other possibilities. Your father fights for love."

As corny as that sounded, Shinji wasn't going to estimate how far people would go for love. Not when Kaworu regularly undid entropy and turned back time to see Shinji again. It was just that unlike Kaworu, Gendo Ikari was a deceptive, poisonous bastard.

And by going after him time and time again, Shinji had been forcing Gendo to evolve to try to face Shinji's assaults?

_Damn it_.

He wanted to say 'can we not try this again? Look, you saw that it won't work, so let's just go get a recording contract and tour all over the world. Forget this whole saving the world thing since it's not going to happen,' but if Gendo Ikari would just keep getting more and more dangerous?

Instead he sighed. "Can we wait a bit before we give Misato back her memories?" They'd damn well better rescue her ASAP. She was almost certainly going to try to kill Kaworu, accuse him of being evil and try to stage interventions to make Shinji realize that he was being manipulated or something, and Shinji had been separated from Kaworu too long to be willing to put up with someone trying to come between them.

"For future reference," he told Kaworu, "don't be naked in front of me even if I don't remember unless you're willing to, you know?" Shinji wished he could say 'I nearly jumped you!' but he'd been too terrified of Kaworu thinking _Shinji_ was the weird one to make a move, which was just pathetic.

Well, it was probably Shinji's fault that Kaworu still hadn't gotten the entire nudity taboo down yet. As much as Shinji hated the thought of those perverted old men at SEELE staring at naked Kaworu, normally Shinji was totally in favor of Kaworu wandering around without clothing. It was kind of endearing that Kaworu still hadn't made the connection between him doing that and Shinji tackling him. Kaworu knew Shinji didn't like it when he was naked for other people, but Shinji wasn't just anyone.

So Kaworu didn't have any idea what it did to Shinji when he stood up like that in the bath and Shinji got an eyeful and why had Shinji wasted valuable time banging his head against the wall? There were so many horrible things in the world, and dwelling on them: that way lay the SEELE side of the force.

* * *

"Where were you all night?" was what Shinji wanted to know.

"She didn't want to sleep alone," Kaworu said, smiling as he mixed up hot chocolate. In a few of the first timelines they spent together Shinji had tried to teach him how to cook, but Kaworu didn't have a lot of natural talent and eventually Shinji had decided that cooking was _his _thing and banned Kaworu from doing anything more complicated than coffee and cereal. He liked cooking, especially for Kaworu. "She's very strong." Now that she'd been cured of the muscle atrophy caused by being tied up for so long, anyway.

Kaworu looked radiant and Shinji reflected again that maybe it wasn't just Rei's resemblance to Yui: she had the soul of Lilith, mother of humanity, while Kaworu had the soul of Adam, mother of the angels, and was clearly one of those people nature intended to be a mom.

_This _was why Shinji tried not to let Kaworu adopt anything that wasn't a cat. This wouldn't be the first time Misato had grabbed Kaworu and forced him to spend the night with her. "The more you indulge her now, the more she'll hate you when you give her those memories," he warned Kaworu.

"That is a shame," Kaworu thought, "but she needs the comfort now." Once Misato got her memories back she'd be a grown woman and hopefully the nightmares wouldn't be as bad. Hopefully she'd need to be comforted less, so hating Kaworu enough to refuse his attempts to make her feel better wouldn't make her suffer as much as Kaworu rejecting her now, when she was a little girl terrified by the memory of that cell, of that soul-crushing solitude.

"Maybe you should grow your hair out?" Shinji wondered, and not just because long hair was fun. Especially angelically strong hair that didn't hurt when it was pulled. "We both look her age, so hopefully that will help her realize that we're not the… Well, that I'm not the kid she knew and you aren't what she thought you were." Was never Shinji's enemy.

Kaworu nodded, and silver tinted grey-lavender fell down to the floor, draping itself around his feet as Misato came in rubbing her eyes and clutching the stuffed penguin Kaworu had procured for her because Kaworu was like that. Shinji really hoped she wouldn't burn it or something once she got her memories back. She blinked. "Why is your hair long?"

"Magic," Kaworu said simply, and Misato nodded, accepting this explanation along with the hot chocolate. No wonder she was willing to accept that Kaworu and Shinji were just magic, instead of making any connections between the color of AT fields and the White Giant, after that magical rescue.

_That _wouldn't last, Shinji thought glumly, looking down into his coffee. Misato was very good at not seeing anything she didn't want to see, but other than that she was pretty damn bright, especially when it came to killing angels.

Kaworu displayed his cereal-making skills. He didn't need to ask what sort Misato liked – this wasn't the first timeline they'd taken her in, since otherwise she would just be recaptured unless they overthrew SEELE. When overthrowing SEELE meant it was a lot harder for the Eva units to be built and generally the Third Angel just walked right through all the conventional forces raised against it to reach Lilith, whose soul might not even have been extracted to create Rei.

Generally buying the planet a few extra months wasn't worth the aggravation of knowing those old men were out there, looking for Kaworu and Shinji and thinking they still had a chance. Especially since if none of the other angels destroyed the world, Adam _would_.

After Misato was supplied with food, Kaworu led her into the TV room and put on one of the movies a young Misato would like, which was good because daddy and mommy – Shinji and Kaworu – needed some alone time.

* * *

Misato's slap didn't even ruffle Kaworu's AT field.

That was because her hand never reached it, but even if she had, it wouldn't have. Shinji knew that, and yet he still couldn't help seeing red, couldn't help grinding the bones in her wrist together hard enough to make her wince. "Don't you _dare _touch him," he said, voice dangerous even if it wasn't especially low (Shinji just had a naturally high-pitched voice). "He sacrificed himself so he wouldn't hurt anyone, and then he brought everyone back to life. He's the only reason I was willing to spend a lifetime as my father's little pawn, thrown away until he wanted me to pilot. He's the one who wanted to save the world, not me. _I _was happy playing music, and… I was happy being _happy_, Misato. I'm only tolerating you as a favor to him, so don't you dare hurt him or you'll find out just whose son I am."

Adam hadn't been in his bloodstream long enough to let him shapeshift, but letting his eyes flash red was a useful parlor trick that he should have regretted a second later. He needed to try to get Misato to accept Kaworu, not make her see him as another angel, another enemy.

"Shinji…" Kaworu said, and he let her go.

"He's…" done something to you? Well, had Misato realized that Shinji was physically in his twenties, older than he had ever lived long enough to reach naturally? Kaworu had given Misato her memories back but her body was still the same: he'd probably done that so she didn't wonder what else he'd done to it, but Shinji appreciated that she was smaller, if it made her less likely to try a physical attack again.

Kaworu was used to gunshots, but people attacking him with their bare hands had a special significance for him. Shinji didn't want anyone doing that to (or for) Kaworu but him.

"My father implanted what was left of Adam into himself so he could use its power," Shinji told her. "If I'm protecting it, then we don't have to worry about him or Lorenz Keel using it to make themselves immortal and get the power of the AT field. Kaworu tried to protect it himself once, but Adam's mind ended up taking him over." Ahead of schedule. "That's never happened to me." Because Shinji wasn't Adam, didn't share Adam's soul, but Shinji wasn't going to tell her that about Kaworu. Not yet, or preferably not ever. It was the only thing he could think of that could make things worse.

"Never?" Misato asked. "You've done this before?"

Shinji nodded. "Lots of times." He didn't know the exact number: Kaworu didn't want to think about the number of times he'd managed to screw up somehow and let the world end early, or let SEELE figure out that he was planning to rebel and lobotomize him or something. It wasn't just a matter of getting along with Shinji: It took Kaworu a long time to even get things to that point, which was probably why he'd tried sticking close to the original scenario (or at least pretending to) in order to meet Shinji instead of trying to fight SEELE after his first few attempts to do that or even just run away ended in failure. Once he and Shinji joined forces, Shinji was a _lot _better at figuring out Lilim than Kaworu, so before long they were able to just do their own thing without things going too badly.

Thank goodness for the reboots, though. If they'd had to live with the consequences of their screwups, like SEELE convincing the world that they were evil angels and making everyone try to hunt them down?

"So this is the first time you had the angel copy my memories?" Misato demanded, putting her hands on childish hips.

"Yes, because I knew you'd react like this," Shinji said. "Kaworu's only been keeping my memories for me because he's my husband. The only reason we're giving you a chance to join the club is that saving the world from the angels, Gendo and SEELE is _hard_. I don't want to kill my husband just so that one of _them _can have their way." Hell no. "But I can't outplot my father on my own and Kaworu's incapable of understanding human selfishness, so he's useless when it comes to that." Blowing things up, yes. Figuring out people? Not even with centuries of practice. "So we let there be a timeline where things went basically the way they will if Kaworu doesn't give me back my memories and doesn't do anything himself but pretend to be SEELE's tame angel, and copied your memories along with Asuka, Ritsuko, Rei and Kaji's so you could see what we're up against and try to brainstorm before we try again in a few reboots."

"Try again in a few… You mean you're just going to let the angels end the world?" Misato demanded.

"Yes," Shinji told her. "Because it's easier to bring everyone back to life if Ramiel or any of the other angels triggers Third Impact than if _my father _triggers it."

"I hope Yui Ikari won't attain more control over her stolen power," Kaworu said thoughtfully. "She's clever enough that she's already very difficult to find if she manages to attain godhood. Since she abandons Earth right away without caring for the fate of those left behind, it can take me easily fifty years just to track her down after I finally awaken as myself, and she'll retreat into Dirac Space if she feels threatened." He looked glum. "She takes the soul of Lilith with her, since the soul of a Lilim isn't enough to hold the divine power she desires. Without Lilith, the life of this world cannot exist: bringing the world back will just make everything fall apart into LCL right away."

Shinji winced not just because the last thing they needed was another problem that would get worse out of the resets but out of sympathy, too. Even though he knew that Kaworu didn't get bored, so spending centuries trying to corner the false god Yui Ikari crafted out of Unit 01 wasn't quite as awful for him as it would be for Shinji or anyone that thought like a Lilim. Kaworu could still get lonely. "Sounds lonely," he said, stating the obvious for Misato's sake, so she'd start to realize that Kaworu could get lonely. The kind of sacrifices he was making for the Lilim.

"This last one was the… fifth time it has happened?" Kaworu guessed. "I'm sorry for leaving you behind on a world of death." A world where no living thing could survive.

Shinji waved off his concern. "I just went back into the LCL and went to sleep." Once it became clear the whole 'returning to life' thing wasn't going to work out. "Do I want to know how long it took you to make her hand over Lilith?"

"I'd rather not tell you," Kaworu told him. "Especially since it was actually shorter than all the other times. I've gotten better at navigating in Dirac Space, catching up to her and making it harder for her to retreat."

That bad, huh?

"She wants to be a lonely god, the sole proof humanity ever existed. She doesn't care if she dooms humanity to extinction, if she deprives all the other Lilim of their lives, as long as she gains the power of both the Fruit of Life and the Fruit of Wisdom." Kaworu's eyes were dark, and Shinji knew that Kaworu just didn't understand how anyone could be so evil. That the question nagged at him, because if he could understand why she would do this to everyone then maybe he could convince her to see reason, to hand over Lilith so Shinji and everyone could come back to life… When the truth was that Yui Ikari simply didn't care. Never had and never could. It would be easier on Kaworu if he could understand that, if he could accept that some people were just monsters and Kaworu couldn't change them any more than Shinji could, but it just wasn't in his nature.

Shinji didn't want it to be, not when Earth was doomed the instant Kaworu gave up on the Lilim. "That aside, no, we can't make attempts to save the world without a plan. Think reincarnation: people are changing a little over the repeats because their souls remember. That includes my dad and all of SEELE. Every time we try to stop them, they'll get a little better at stopping us from stopping them. So we need a plan. You can go charging in half-cocked and screw up this timeline if you want to _help them_, but then we just won't give you your memories back next time, and you can go back to being my dad's pawn, ignoring all the evidence that he's using you to help him destroy the world so you can kill angels until it's too late to do anything that could possibly make a difference."

Kaworu gave him a look, pleading with him for Misato's sake to be nice to her.

"Don't you dare try to hit my husband ever again," Shinji warned her. "And before you try to say he's lying to me or is just using me, we've been married for centuries. Centuries, Misato. After all this time, I know him a lot better than you do. Even if angels weren't genetically human anyway, he's half-Lilim. He's just like you and me, except he's a lot kinder and better than either of us."

Kaworu laughed, startled, and then shook his head sadly. Probably remembering that kitten thing and thinking that Shinji was wrong, that Shinji was the kindest one.

Well, that just went to show that Kaworu was delusional when it came to Lilim, so Shinji didn't even try to correct him.

"Maybe I should have let you raise them," Shinji said later, "Copy those memories too, and then give them those memories along with the NERV memories." Even Asuka wasn't too bad when she was raised properly: if Misato had years of experience with Kaworu proving that he was caring and could be trusted, then hopefully she'd be willing to listen.

"I won't mind that," Kaworu said a little sadly, looking at the door leading to the garden. They'd bought this specific estate since it had a separate cottage that Misato could take if she wanted her space. Kaworu was probably worried that she'd have nightmares all alone out there. Well, it was better than Misato having nightmares here in the house, where Kaworu might hear them and not be able to do anything to help, now that he was no longer welcome in her room.

"Asuka?" Shinji suggested, since she was the one he was really worried about. "It might make a difference if my housemate is a fellow pilot instead of an enemy." Someone trying to grind him down into the ground because Shinji being even barely competent detracted from her spotlight, the glory she needed to live. "If people are changing over the repeats, then if Asuka knew she was loved no matter what…" By anyone. And Kaworu was good at letting people know they were loved.

Now, anyway.

That was why Shinji couldn't help falling for him all over again.

But, he knew that, "Misato won't stand for us doing that this time."

* * *

"Where's the beer?" Misato wanted to know.

"There is none," Shinji told her, a little surprised to see her only an hour after she'd stormed out. She must have found the kitchenette in the cottage and discovered the lack of beer. One of the things about physic ally being a child was that it was harder to calm down. "You're too young and Kaworu and I don't drink, aside from maybe a little wine," or whatever went with what Shinji was cooking. "Can you imagine what would happen if someone with an angel's power got drunk? I guess we're lucky that the healing abilities get rid of toxins like alcohol." Meaning they couldn't get drunk, or drugged and captured. "I thought you'd start reading the files on that laptop."

"I did. Now I really need a drink."

"You can ask Kaworu to make you an adult when he gets back," Shinji told her, adjusting the flame under one of his pots. "I've never altered anyone's age. It took him awhile to figure out how to do it, since just going straight from childhood to adulthood means skipping a lot of brain development." Why Kaworu couldn't age his own brain up until he was at least smart enough to control the process, and he certainly wasn't going to mess with Shinji's mind until his own was functioning well enough he could be sure he wouldn't mess up and leave him retarded. Shinji was sure that prohibition was the fruit of a lot of failures and failed resets.

"Where is he?" Misato asked, looking around as though he might pop out of nowhere. So she remembered the rescue, huh?

"Out getting cat food."

Misato narrowed her eyes. "Tabris: that's his name, isn't it?"

"That's his name in the prophecies," Shinji told her, glad she didn't know that Kaworu had Adam's soul. That information was left out of the files on the laptop, but who knew what Misato had found out last time? "_His _name is Kaworu. Kaworu Nagisa. I'd take his last name to get rid of the Ikari, but that's what my father did."

Watching him cook, Misato said, "There's nothing in my kitchenette but milk and cereal." The same kiddie cereal they'd given her before her memories were restored: was Shinji the one to move it into her kitchen in order to get it out of his own? "Where's a convenience store?"

"That's fine for midnight snacks. I do the cooking around here," Shinji told her. "We're on a private island, and even onshore they don't really have convenience stores like the ones you're thinking of here. If you want something special, ask Kaworu."

"Is he the only one who can teleport?" How many angel abilities did Shinji have? "An angel with that power…" Could ignore the Evas and go right to Terminal Dogma.

"In theory I could, but he can't teach me since he doesn't know how he does it. It's something he inherited from Leliel and had to play around with while he was chasing down my mother. He got his body destroyed by accident too many times for me to want to experiment with it." Kaworu had the instincts thanks to Leliel: Shinji didn't. Shinji also didn't have a soul that was immortal in the same way Kaworu's was. "Not when I can have him do it for me. Also," he said, leveling a ladle at her, "You hurt his feelings. He's not good at faking human: he's no good at faking _anything_. He really cares about you. Going from letting him be your new mommy to thinking he's a monster: that hurts him. I've been rejected and hurt too much myself to just stand by and let someone else hurt my husband that way. Maybe sucking up to him since he's your only chance to see a beer within the next five years will force you to be nice to him. If you aren't, then I certainly am not going to do you any favors."

"He's the one who tried to make me think he loved me!"

"Made you think he loved you? He can't make anyone think anything. Or he's doing well if he can make people see things that are true." His attempts to convince Shinji to love him back were clumsy and useless, but once he learned how to _show_ Shinji that Kaworu loved him? The pure and purely devastating sincerity of it: how could Shinji not love him back, not pounce in order to keep all that love for himself? "How many reboots, and he still wanders around looking like Rei and calling humans Lilim? He can't even really hide what he is, Misato, not if people are looking." If people knew angels in human form could exist. "There's no way he could hide holding you in contempt or something like that." SEELE never had any trouble figuring that out, anyway, but then Kaworu absolutely despised them. Shinji stirred the soup. "He can't even hide that he loves me: he _promised _me I wouldn't fall in love with him last timeline, since he didn't wake me up before I killed him, and he still had to sit there and be nicer to me than everyone else put together."

Then he frowned at himself, because that wasn't being fair to Misato. "Sorry. It's not fair to compare what it was like living with you to living with someone really loves me and has known me for centuries. Kaworu tries really hard to make me happy." When by the end, Misato had barely kept trying to keep Shinji functioning. It wasn't like she'd asked for a child who was being driven insane: she'd agreed to take in a teenage soldier, when Misato's childhood was long behind her, on the other side of a darkness she couldn't bear to think about. She'd had no idea what she was getting into. "It's just really embarrassing to think about what happened, how my father and SEELE used me for what they wanted…. It's not fair to expect you to stop them when you didn't know the truth." Of course, by the end Misato had found out a lot of the truth, hadn't she? Thanks to Kaji. Kaji getting information to Misato a little before Kaworu usually arrived was one of the things Kaworu found out about over the repeats. "We're going to need to work together, otherwise one of these days they'll manage to destroy the world and make it stick this time. And no one wants that except crazy old men." Even if Shinji was much, much older than Gendo now, so he had no excuse for being immature.

"If you're hungry, lunch will be in another half-hour, and now that you've moved out, don't come in our house without knocking."

* * *

_It's not just that seeing everyone die and come back made him callous about human life._

_He's actively been making an effort to armor his heart, to tell himself it's okay that he can't save the world and all the people he fought to protect (manga especially) will just die. But underneath, when he doesn't remember all of that, is the same anime!Shinji who gets devastated so easily by seeing others suffer. People don't like pain and psychological defense mechanisms, the delusions we cling to and lies we tell to avoid outright insanity are dangerous things. He has to work so hard to be a jerk since otherwise, trying and failing to save the world over and over would have broken Shinji permanently. _

_He _has _to delude himself into thinking that it's all okay, that there's nothing wrong with the way things are, with history repeating and Kaworu having to kill or die over and over, since otherwise it would have ground him down into nothing by now and he would have had to beg Kaworu to stop restoring his memories, or wipe them and start over with the next Shinji so he wouldn't remember seeing the world end again, and again, and again, while knowing that it's going to happen again, and again and again, and the only alternative is everyone he loves (except Kaworu) dying and staying dead, while Kaworu has to go on alone. 'Everything's going to be okay, everyone will be fine, there's no need to worry about it.'_

_He's made the decision to try to save the world and end the reboots now, but consider all of Shinji's insane moments in the original series and Rebuild. He can and will crack if everything hits him. He doesn't want to crack and thinking about actually ending the reboots involves thinking about all the stuff that has driven him insaneish or made him catatonically depressed in canon, plus several lifetimes worth of extra. Even though he's making an effort consciously, on an unconscious level he is trying to sabotage Misato's ability to get along with them and make this work so he can label this experiment a failure and tell Kaworu to stop restoring her memories, at least for awhile._

_I wanted to skip over the 'getting to know you' parts as much as possible, at the stage when this was intended to be a pure comedy fic, since as Eva shows it's hard for people to get along even in the face of the end of the world, but Shinji would rather gripe about how difficult Misato and Asuka are and ignore the fact that this is his own fault._


	3. Wall Around the Heart

_If I'd known this was going to be so determined to be a long fic, I would have shown more of Kaworu maturing from manga Kaworu to anime Kaworu, since there would certainly be a lot of hilarious moments in there. Especially since the way SEELE taught him, blowing up cities and other evil stuff is normal Lilim behavior, so if he's trying to act like a normal Lilim so Shinji would like him… Yeeeeeeah. _

_It wasn't 'I like Shinji, Shinji is a Lilim, therefore I like Lilim,' in the same way Shinji's trust for Kaworu hasn't been extended to other people. Rather, his appreciation for Lilim came out of his appreciation of our music and culture – could Lilim really make such beautiful things if there was nothing but evil in their hearts? Ode to Joy is held up as the symbol of why anime!Kaworu was willing to die for humanity, not just Shinji. _

_He also has issues about 'if he does something wrong, Shinji will hate him,' because of timelines where that happened. A lot. The cat was the first thing he did wrong, the first reason Shinji hated him, so the Friend To All Living Things came out of trying not to be someone Shinji would hate, and then he discovered that he liked looking after Lilith's creatures, and that extended to Lilim, too. _

* * *

Misato was enough of a professional to seclude herself in her own cottage studying the data (bar joining them for meals when she had to) while Shinji took a vacation from being the Third Child and threw himself into cooking and music to try to forget what happened and Kaworu wandered around the island gardening and turning it into a cat sanctuary.

Until the day Kaworu came into the breakfast room holding a little redheaded girl by the hand.

"…But Dr. Sohryu isn't dead yet," Shinji finally managed to say, shocked. Shinji wished Kaworu would steal him away from his parents, but taking Asuka away from her mother? "Right?"

"_That_ is not my mommy," Asuka said, face scrunched up into an angry pout, hiding behind anger and contempt. "He showed me that my real mommy is in the Eva. So I came with him. You're Shinji, aren't you?" She attempted to stare him down.

Shinji was unimpressed: he'd dealt with Asuka before, and an older Asuka since normally Kaworu waited until Dr. Sohryu killed what was left of herself. "I'll make another side dish." Since it would be four for dinner.

"Shinji?" Kaworu looked disappointed in him. Couldn't he be a little friendlier.

"Welcome to our island." Kaworu probably wanted Shinji to say 'welcome to our home,' but he thought they could count on Misato to insist on taking her in to get her away from the angel.

"Why haven't you given her back her memories?" Misato asked that evening, after Asuka was in bed.

"Because I'd rather deal with an Asuka who won't see me having a healthy relationship and being a successful adult as a personal insult," Shinji said bluntly. She viewed Shinji as a competitor, and finding out that Shinji now had this much of a head start over her, knew so much more than her instead of being a neglected kid dealing with a hothouse college graduate? "Let's give her memories of a few lifetimes being mentally stable instead of so needy before she has to deal with what Arael did to her, okay?" It would be harder for the angel's words to knock her down if she had a firm foundation.

Kaworu smiled, happy and surprised. He liked Asuka more than Shinji did, since Asuka had never gotten to spend a significant amount of time trying to make him miserable. Sure, Asuka hated the world and despised humans, but Kaworu's first impression of humanity was SEELE, and Asuka was a regular Pollyanna compared to them. "Really, dear?"

"Really," Shinji nodded. "You can start making up the bedroom second thing tomorrow."

"Third," Kaworu said. "After she has breakfast. Will you show her around the island while I'm gone?" Would Shinji at least try to bond with Asuka while Kaworu was out buying things for her?

* * *

Three days later, when Kaworu was thoroughly occupied with painting Asuka's new room in preparation for all the furniture and shelves they'd picked out, Misato made her move.

Shinji was honestly wondering what had taken her that long, but she was a soldier: perhaps it took her this long to become confident she could lure them into a false sense of security. Then there was the problem of the island's location and how she was going to find a place with people.

It would have been a little less annoying if Kaworu hadn't sensed the memory storage he'd given her being hooked up to the internet one of the few times Shinji had managed to pull Kaworu away from the new baby to get him in bed. Just because Kaworu wasn't watching everything Misato did with her computer didn't mean Kaworu didn't know what would happen if those files were released on the world without warning. It would be a race between the people who wanted to protect Misato and the SEELE-controlled UN forces trying to neutralize her so that information and the truth about Second Impact could be covered up.

Kaworu liked the feeling of Shinji's hands on his neck: it reminded him of when Shinji granted him mercy and freed him from having to be either SEELE's tool or Adam's, not that Kaworu had found out that if he lived too long Adam would take him over until quite a few timelines later, the first one where he managed to live that long.

If those hands applied pressure it gave him the most beautiful, serene, transcendent expression. Utterly trusting, his life in Shinji's hands, and if Shinji wanted to take it then Kaworu would render it up to him without hesitation as he had before and would again.

After Shinji's parents sacrificed him for their own gain, to see proof someone loved him so much, was so very willing to sacrifice himself because he loved Shinji?

Kaworu was surely too perfect to be human.

So when Kaworu suddenly blinked and vanished out from under him, sending Shinji dropping a few centimeters to the bed, Shinji knew it had to be an emergency and at least had a sheet pulled around himself when Kaworu reappeared with a struggling Misato wearing wet clothing. Kaworu released her, and said, "She made it to the mainland and found an internet café."

Shinji really wanted to yell at Misato for that, but she still saw herself as a soldier of the UN, one of humanity's defenders, so really… Wasn't she obligated to try? Maybe it wasn't just about killing the angels, maybe she really wanted to save the world.

She cared about saving the world, she was willing to fight impossible odds (Shinji and Kaworu had a lot of power, even if they didn't have plots and conspiracies like Gendo and SEELE) to accomplish that mission, and Shinji didn't know if he'd been that noble, well, ever.

It kind of made him wish that he was a better person.

Not enough to keep him from glaring at her. She stared defiantly back.

In stories, wasn't saving the world supposed to get you hot chicks or something? So far, his own attempts to save the world seemed to mostly consist of him getting cockblocked.

He was really tempted to point at the door and tell her to go outside, he'd deal with her later. Couldn't she figure out what they were in the middle of here? Except he was trying to be mature, and a better person, and treating _Misato _like a kid who didn't deserve input into adult matters yet was just going to piss her off, and he was certain she could be even more annoying than Asuka if she put her mind to it. So, "Give us a couple minutes to put some clothes on and go find Asuka: we'll have a family meeting."

* * *

With her memories and fourteen-year-old body restored Asuka moved into Misato's cottage along with the now-adult Misato, leaving Kaworu to look forlornly at the half-painted room before closing his eyes in sad defeat and starting to clean up the paint cans and brushes, some of them sized for a child's hands. Kaworu loved kids, even rude ones like Asuka who weren't as smart as they thought they were. He was infinitely patient with them because they reminded him of himself, how hard it was for him to manage in the Lilim world. How rude he'd been because he didn't understand politeness. Maybe he wanted to do for them what no one had done for him, not when SEELE wanted him to feel like someone who couldn't make a life on this world, couldn't live with these people.

The last thing Shinji was going to do was make any jokes about the biological clock even in the privacy of his own head, because Kaworu did have a biological clock. The angelic version. A biological alarm clock that would wake up Adam and make her fill the world with her children a few years from now, if the other angels didn't succeed first or Shinji didn't hit the snooze button by killing Kaworu so Adam's soul had to find another host instead of taking over Kaworu.

He bent down to put a hand on Kaworu's shoulder, thinking of those lost children, of just how much Kaworu was giving up to restore the Lilim world.

And Shinji had just been taking that for granted? "We'll find a way," he promised Kaworu. "That everyone can live, and time can move forward again." With both of them alive, and together. "We can have children then."

The way they couldn't now. Not because they were both guys: Adam's original body was female, as the mother of the angels. Kaworu honestly didn't see much difference between a male form and a female one, and probably just stayed in male form most of the time because that was how this body started out (SEELE hadn't liked the implications of Adam being female, sexist old bastards) and physical sex wasn't worth the effort to change unless Shinji expressed a preference.

It was because a child born of Kaworu was a child of Adam. And right now, the children of Adam were being called, being forced, to merge with the progenitors. If Kaworu had Shinji's child, he would be condemning that child to lose control of themselves and try to destroy the world at some point, and Kaworu wouldn't wish that on anyone. Especially not children. Especially not his beloved's children.

"Shinji," Kaworu said, straightening up and turning to face him. "How…" The angel swallowed, and Shinji saw the brightness in the corners of his eyes before Kaworu flung himself into Shinji's arms. "How could you have ever doubted that you are kind?" Kaworu shuddered, trying not to cry for Shinji's sake. "Your beautiful heart of glass…" The heart that hurt and broke for others, because Shinji cared for others instead of only about himself. Even angels like Rei, and now Kaworu.

"It's easy to care about people who care about me," Shinji told him, stroking Kaworu's back, feeling the long, silky hair. "It's harder to care about people when I've tried and tried and they still don't care. They'll eat my food, but if they ask me 'how are you' they don't want to hear the truth."

Kaworu squeezed him, to prove to him that yes, Kaworu did care. Shinji was worthy of love. "I want to make you happy. I wish to grant you eternal happiness, a happily ever after. I don't want to watch you fall apart into orange again and again." Kaworu's AT field was stronger, so it was harder to pull him into Third Impact. Unless he was driven to despair by the loss of Shinji, until the mass wore Shinji's face when it bade Kaworu surrender his soul.

Kaworu could never refuse him anything.

"I don't want to be the one responsible for your death. I don't want to watch your heart break as you kill me." So that Shinji and the Lilim could live even a little longer. "I want to see you again, not five or five hundred years later, but the next morning. To watch every sunset with you, for all of our immortal lives." Pale hands clutched at the back of Shinji's jacket. "It hurt so much to see you suffer when you didn't remember. I don't want to risk that again, don't want you to think that you aren't loved. But what if, what if some day I can't bring the world of the Lilim back? What if someday my personality doesn't return, and all that is left is Adam? What if someday I cannot bring you back and I will never see you again? I, I'm sorry for asking you to try to save this world! I'm sorry for leaving you alone among the Lilim all those years, and seeing you so briefly! But, Shinji…"

"I don't want to lose you forever either, Kaworu." That was what it came down to, wasn't it? If they let SEELE and Gendo get better and better at this, while Shinji screwed around and became Iron Chef instead of saving a dying world, then eventually the old men would get lucky. In their scenario, Adam's soul was supposed to be just a voiceless, powerless component of the ascendance of the Lilim. If some tweak to the recipe prevented Adam from breaking free, if Kaworu's personality didn't resurface?

Shinji could lose Kaworu.

Even if Kaworu still loved him, Shinji could lose Kaworu.

Oh, and the world could end and stay ended, but that wasn't the real reason Shinji had agreed to trying to save it. It wasn't why he'd piloted Eva to begin with: he'd gone into that thing because otherwise Rei was going to die.

It was probably a good thing that he'd never seriously believed that what he was doing was going to save the world, that he hadn't been stupid enough to really believe that his father was up to any good even when he was pathetic enough to eat up any grudging scrap of approval that bastard bothered to toss his way. He'd fought for Rei, for Misato and those two boys from school and even Asuka.

If Shinji had to save the world in order to keep the people he cared about from harm, then he was just going to have to do this thing.

* * *

"You, you pervert!" the redhead said, whirling on him and starting to curse at him in German when Shinji got back from his morning run. Although he was fluent in German now, especially the curse words, it was hard for Shinji to take offense when a lot of those 'insults' were related to the details of having sex with another man and yeah, good times.

"I was a boy who liked to cook and clean and I didn't mind wearing frilly aprons," Shinji said bluntly. "I thought you knew I was bi." When he was the Shinji Ikari who didn't know he was loved, it terrified him. He was afraid that Misato and everyone else would find out and realize that he was weird, call him a pervert. He didn't want Touji and Kensuke to avoid him. "…Wait, now you're calling me a pervert because you think I _wouldn't _want to see you naked?" There was just no way to win with Asuka, was there, he thought, stretching.

Especially not when he hadn't bothered to wear a shirt on that run, Asuka's eyes were now focused on his abs and Asuka had a thing for older men.

Yeah, she was blushing as she sputtered now, and it wasn't with rage. Even Kaworu had picked up on it, and as lovey-dovey as Kaworu was with Shinji and as nice as he was to children and random strangers on the street, that didn't extend to bastards like SEELE and people who tried to take Shinji away from him. That little frown was as close as Kaworu got these days to announcing that he was one more second of annoying Lilim stupidity away from grabbing a bitch, teleporting up into Near Earth Orbit and dropping them. Back in the days before Kaworu started having conscience attacks about killing minions of SEELE and other bastards who deserved it, that frown generally resulted in somebody getting stabbed.

Kaworu thought that killing people with your bare hands was for people (and cats) you liked and felt sorry for. Weapons, especially knives and spears, were for people you didn't want to touch.

That reminded Shinji of that time back when Kaworu still thought killing evil people was fun that they'd gotten some swords and invaded Keel's estate wearing masks and red cloaks, but that wasn't really relevant.

"Well, well _do something_!" Asuka ordered.

"Do what? Remind you that it's rude to barge in to other people's homes without knocking?" Shinji asked, grabbing one of the kitchen towels.

"Do something about that angel walking around like Lady Godiva!"

"Yeah, that is the disadvantage of long hair," Shinji said to himself.

"He said you just let him walk around naked, and you would have kept me a child in this house? Pervert!"

Yeah, that was another reason Shinji wasn't too keen on Kaworu adopting human children. It meant Kaworu would keep his clothes on.

"What's going on?" Misato wanted to know, coming in the door behind Shinji and accepting the other kitchen towel so she could wipe herself down a little after the run.

"You're the one who decided to be the adult in Asuka's life," Shinji told her. "_You _can explain to her that it's rude to barge into other people's houses without knocking, and if she doesn't grow out of it quick then it's her own fault if she get shot or sees something she can't unsee." Obviously Asuka'd liked what she saw of Kaworu. That was the real reason she was so upset by it: she hated having to admire other people she saw as competition, even their bodies. Knowing that Kaworu was so much more beautiful than her and feeling herself react to that beauty was going to infuriate her. "As for me, I'm going to go take a long bath _with my husband_." So other people could _stop staring at his Kaworu._

* * *

Misato knocked. Hearing no response, she said, "I'm coming in." Still no answer, so she checked the wine cupboard under the stairs. "I'm taking these, does anyone mind?" Silence. "Thanks!"

She considered retreating with her spoils (the wine Shinji picked out was always _very _good, although she preferred her beer on principle), but this might be her chance to see if they had any additional files or a phone, radio or computer with an internet connection in the bedroom.

Just to be safe, she knocked on that door too.

She heard a soft yawn. "Yes?"

Blast. "Kaworu? Are you home alone?"

"Yes. Shinji took the boat to the mainland," he said, and she could hear him shifting around, the sounds of fabric slipping over fabric. "Come in?"

If there was a boat, the question was where it was hidden. Misato hadn't found anything like that and she'd looked. She was surprised Kaworu told her about it, instead of letting her assume that he'd teleported Shinji to the mainland and dropped him off there as per usual.

She opened the door to find the pale angel of death (the angel whose death had hurt Shinji like nothing else) sitting up in bed amidst sheets of pale silk, illuminated by the warm sunlight streaming in through the opened bay windows. "You're in bed this late in the day?" she asked him, setting the wine bottles down where Kaworu couldn't see them through the door before she went in.

He nodded, smiling softly before lying back down, leaning against a pile of pillows. "Every time this resumes, I spend a few years experiencing nothing but tubes of lukewarm LCL and the chill air, cold tables and prodding instruments. There are so many things in this world that make life wonderful, but to rest in sun-warmed silk sheets, smelling the sea breeze and waiting for my beloved's return is one of those joys."

"I'm sure he'll be happy to see you," Misato said, especially since she was sure Kaworu was naked under those sheets.

"Thank you," Kaworu said happily, snuggling into the pillows a little, and she wondered if they smelled of Shinji. "So many joys life grants us: 'kisses and wine, and a friend loyal unto death. Pleasure is granted even to the lowly worm, and the cherub stands before God.' I heard that song in Tokyo-2, long ago. I could understand all the words, but I didn't know what half of it meant."

Misato stiffened a little when he said wine. It looked like Kaworu noticed, because he said, "You found the red? If you haven't yet, then I shouldn't have mentioned that. Shinji didn't want you to know he's kept extra bottles there so you will take them. He doesn't think very highly of Yebisu, so he's hoping that giving you some _good _alcohol will make your tastes align with his. He's really a snob when it comes to food and wine." Kaworu looked fond more than annoyed. "Most of the beers he likes are seasonal, so the rest of the year you'll have more luck asking for wine or sake."

"Does he say that reds match your eyes?" Misato asked almost morbidly. So Shinji came up with plots like that now?

"And sweet whites my temperament: Shinji is a musician. He can be very poetic, especially when he's drunk."

"I thought he said he couldn't get drunk." That was the kind of thing that stuck in Misato's memory.

"Both of us can get drunk on the atmosphere, especially in Prague." Kaworu laughed, pushing back silvery hair. "Then he ruined the moment by saying that sweet whites were fruity, just like me. Which is true, but not especially romantic as C-one of the people from the orchestra who was at that little restaurant with us pointed out. Forgive me: it's not often I have anyone to reminisce with, except for Shinji. Did you come here looking for something besides alcohol?"

Why not admit it? "Information and a way to get that information to the outside world?"

The angel looked thoughtful and a little unhappy at that. "I thought it was a better idea to let you and Asuka experiment instead of treating you like prisoners, but Shinji was frightened by the prospect of Gendo Ikari growing even more dangerous. I don't think the five of you together – once Rei is born and we decide how to handle Kaji and Ritsuko – could waste even a fraction of the reboots I did with my ignorance. Shinji… He thinks highly of you," he offered. "If you and Asuka come up with a plan for next timeline, I don't think it will be hard to convince him to follow it. Especially since… that last timeline, being a helpless child sent to fight in the Eva, reopened old wounds. Since he doesn't dare lash out at his father any more, his anger lacks a direction."

"So it's getting taken out on me and Asuka?" Misato's eyes narrowed.

"That is part of it, but…" Kaworu turned to look out the window. "His heart is of glass, shattered again and again and pieced together. It is bright, and strong, but it cuts deep because of how deeply it has been wounded. I wanted him to love and trust me, that was my dearest wish, but he was abandoned by his parents, those a child places their first faith in. With that faith broken, he did not know how to trust. Not anyone, including himself, because what if they left because he was lacking? He has learned to trust himself, and placed his trust in me, but he doesn't know how to trust anyone else. He has had friends, but they have been _our _friends, and he never even considered telling them the truth, or holding them too closely to his heart."

Red eyes turned back to her. "The broken boy you knew is part of Shinji, Misato, and every timeline he returns to that boy. Once again, his parents do not love him. Once again, he cannot be happy unless he is rescued. At first, I wanted these resets to go on eternally. A playground, just for the two of us, where we could become stronger and no one else could, not enough to harm us. Yet every time, Shinji is harmed. He cannot let go of that child and his pain as long as destiny… As I force him into the role of that child again and again. He cannot move on, Misato. Just like the world of the Lilim."

"So you're saying we're prisoners here because he doesn't trust us, and our only way to get off this island or get a chance to try to save this world is to stop trying to escape? Or jump through whatever more hoops are necessary to make him trust us?"

"Jumping through hoops?" Kaworu smiled to himself, "I spent centuries figuring out where those hoops were, tripping over my own two feet. No, I had to build several of those hoops: I had to teach Shinji what trust was before he could even consider placing his trust in me. In the end, I think it was his soul's memory that let me win him, not anything I could do in only a handful of months. Those centuries of patient devotion. Shinji will tell you that I possess inhuman patience, but when I was a child I was very impatient, knowing I would not have very long at all to live. Patience is something I learned for Shinji's sake."

"So you have no sympathy for me," Misato remarked wryly.

"I feel sorry for those who don't have Shinji's trust… but no. Absolutely none." He smiled, and it was only mostly friendly. "You have no idea how many of the scars on Shinji's heart are your doing, Misato. You took him in, he began to open up to you in the place of his parents, and then. You didn't damage him on purpose, you didn't mean to teach him that all doors would be slammed in his face, but you added to his belief that those he thought cared for him would just use him. I had to undo the work of Gendo Ikari, Yui Ikari… and you as well. The reason he doesn't trust you is _you_. He trusts you less than he would a stranger, and that is your own doing. So complaining about how spending only a few years working to undo some of the harm you did to Shinji and earn his trust is too much effort, in the presence of someone who has spent altogether too much time trying to heal, to even work around the damage you did… No. You dug your own grave, Misato Katsuragi. Stop digging yourself in deeper."

A sigh, and he really was as pretty as a picture. Then again, this was a tableau he had set up, a scene meant for Shinji's eyes. "That isn't fair to you, but nothing is fair. Although I wish to save the Lilim, I am on Shinji's side, not yours or my sister's."

"Your sister? Do you mean Rei or one of the angels?" One of the _other _angels.

"I mean Asuka." Kaworu was a little surprised. "I thought that was in the files. Dr. Sohryu used the same 'perfect' Lilim DNA used to create me for her 'perfect' daughter. SEELE only tolerated it because it meant Asuka could be used as a control group, to judge how superior I was to the Lilim. So she is my half-sister, just as Rei is Shinji's."

That seemed as though it couldn't be right. Asuka's intensely human fire and Tabris' pale glow, like moonlight or radioactivity: they couldn't spring from the same source. Asuka couldn't be an angel – except all Lilim were angels, weren't they.

Asuka couldn't be inhuman… but that would mean that Tabris was half-human, wouldn't it? It would be admitting that this young man sculpted of marble was half-human. Even entirely human, if humans and angels really were the same. "What are you after?" she asked him. "What are you really after."

"Shinji's happiness," Tabris, the angel of free will, told her. "His eternal happiness. For my beloved to know nothing but joy. For myself to never again have to find him crying and abandoned, believing for even an instant that he is not loved. I have destroyed this world more times than I care to think about, fighting for that wish. So it must be possible to save it, and Shinji with it. I will not settle for anything less."

* * *

_Remember the frown Kaworu had when he descended to spear Shinji and Rei in Rebuild 2.22? According to an interview, they decided to change his expression from a smile to a frown because it seemed amusing fairly late in the process. The interviewer said, 'that looks like a 'bitch, you were _not _cheating on me while I was away, and with a woman?' frown,' and the person giving the interview laughed and definitely didn't deny that was the reason they did it. I note the 'Depraved Bisexual'/'bi people are sluts' trope/stereotype._

_Shinji? Is canonically bi. I'm not even talking about the manga. I'm not talking about the 'I loved him too' talk with Misato after Kaworu's dead in the anime. I'm talking about the director's cut of the bath scene, when Kaworu stands up and we see Shinji looking between Kaworu's legs for a long time and definitely liking what he sees. _

_Kaworu seems oblivious, so he might not be physically attracted to Shinji if he doesn't even recognize what physical attraction looks like, but yeah, Shinji would like to tap that. That's physical attraction right there._


	4. Sacred Domain

_In the second draft of episode 24, the first draft that Anno was involved with, Kaworu had scars on his wrists from previous suicide attempts. He tells Shinji 'you're the only one that can kill me,' and it's clear he didn't just take the prophecies' word for this, he damn well _tried _to kill himself. Otherwise he knew at some point, as he said in the actual episode, 'that which came from Adam has to return to Adam.' At some point his instincts were going to take control over him (which they did in the draft because Shinji hesitated too long) and the only way to stop himself from triggering Third Impact and killing everyone was to die before that happened. It was him or humanity, and he chose humanity, tried to give his life if that was what it took to save everyone else, well before he went to NERV and met Shinji. _

_It would be nice if that made it into the final version of the episode so people knew that no, Kaworu wasn't doing this to hurt Shinji, he was doing this because he knew he needed to die to spare the human race and this was the only thing that would fucking work. Adam is supposed to be immortal: it was at the center of a huge explosion in Antarctica and that little piece of its body is _still alive. _If you look at the case it's in, someone wrote (in Engrish) what amounts to, 'What is this? It's alive… _How!?_' on there. Kaworu may be Adam's host body instead of its original body, but the 'immortal white seeds' are _not _easy to kill._

_It's worth noting that in episode 24, even though they didn't use their limited screen time to explain why it had to be Shinji, they still positioned Kaworu and the camera such that neither the viewer nor Shinji ever saw the insides of Kaworu's wrists. _

_So if people ask why Kaworu forced Shinji to kill him in the anime, well, if they went to such an effort to hide the scars, it's probable that they're still there. That part of Anno's vision of Kaworu (who remember, was supposed to be 'such a purely good person that just meeting him was going to give Shinji a complex' according to that interview) is that he _tried _to keep Shinji from having to do that. _

_Especially over reboots, after seeing that killing him traumatizes Shinji, he would experiment and try to find out if there's some other way he can make himself stay dead. Unfortunately, since this is Evangelion and they like torturing Shinji, there probably isn't. Kaworu most likely just can't die unless Shinji kills him. If Kaworu doesn't die, angelic instinct will take over and trigger Third Impact, killing everyone including Shinji. Sucks to be them._

_Since Rebuild is in the same verse as the anime and has the same worldbuilding, 'Shinji is the only one who can kill Kaworu' is probably still in play. SEELE knew this was the case even in the final draft of the episode ('Now Ikari, do your duty with Unit 01'), so Gendo probably knows, since he set all that up in Q to kill Kaworu. Calls it deicide: killing a god. More like an elder god…_

_So the question is whether or not the collar counts. Kaworu dying to stop Fourth Impact so Shinji could live means he's dying because of Shinji, but it's still not at the hands of Shinji. _

_Kaworu says he'll see Shinji again: the question is whether he's saying that to try to make Shinji feel less bad that they failed since they can try again next timeline, or because he knows that the collar won't kill him and doesn't want to go into the details of why. 'Oh, don't worry, I'm not going to die now, but that's because you have no choice but to murder me yourself later or a Fifth Impact will happen.' Yeeeeeah. As I said, sucks to be them._

* * *

He knelt by the side of the pond, pounding spikes into the ground. The spikes were made of minerals and nutrients that would slowly dissolve into the earth and nourish the two young willow trees. There were plenty of other beautiful islands with better soil than this one, but gardening was more fun when it wasn't easy. When it took years and years of work, constant attention to the needs of fragile living things. When he could watch them grow strong and know that it was because of him. Not because of his powers, but the work of his own two Lilim hands.

Plants were a lot like Shinji was at first: they wouldn't tell you what was wrong. They would simply be withering, failing to thrive, and how to save them? Too little sunlight or too much, too much watering or not enough. The acidity of the soil, the minerals in their diet: so many things that would never affect an angel.

He could feel that he was being watched.

Kaworu could have dodged the kick that came at his head, but Asuka's momentum might have made her hit one of the trees. Probably intentionally. Despite this, he felt a little bad about catching her foot instead even as he did it, because that would probably… Yes, it did make her lose her balance and send her crashing to the ground.

The grass was soft, so he wasn't worried that he'd hurt her. He winced because she would find this embarrassing and that wasn't going to help. Well, it _was _embarrassing: didn't she know that, "I could sense you coming, and SEELE had me study your simulation and combat footage. If I were you, I would assume that I will anticipate all of your usual moves and try to use that against me." Try feinting with a move that seemed to be classic Asuka, for example, to draw him out of position.

She had already rolled to her feet: "What's this about you being my brother?" she demanded. "There's no way my mother would have used an angel's DNA to make me!"

Kaworu was left confused by that statement: wouldn't Dr. Sohryu have to use an angel's DNA to make Asuka? Unless she used an animal's, which gave him the mental image of an Asuka with cat ears bristling at him. Oh, yes, this was the distinction Lilim who weren't SEELE made between Lilim and everything else, even though Lilim were angels too. "She used Lilim DNA to make you," he offered. "Did Misato give you the impression that she used Adam's DNA? The old men would not have tolerated that. They were upset enough that she used the same Lilim DNA to make you that they had the Katsuragi Expedition use to make me."

"That doesn't make you my brother!" she said, which left Kaworu further puzzled.

The obvious response was that no, it made him her half-brother, but Asuka was certainly smart enough to know that already. Kaworu had pissed off a lot of people before he realized that when Lilim said something that seemed stupid, it was often because they were saying that thing to mean something else.

Asuka had conceded that they might have a genetic relationship easily enough that it couldn't be what she was really upset about, and yet she still didn't want to acknowledge him as her brother?

Oh! Yes, family.

Most of the early examples of family relationships Kaworu saw consisted of people using each other, but family relationships were depicted very differently in fiction. At first he thought this was because it was _fiction_, unrealistic wish-fulfillment fantasies just like the relationships depicted in romance novels, but once he encountered Lilim in their natural habitat (away from SEELE and NERV's poisonous influence) more often he started to find evidence that maybe there actually were families whose members cared about each other.

Dr. Sohryu saw Asuka as a means to one-up the woman her husband left her for because Dr. Sohryu hadn't managed to give him a child after years of trying. Yet Asuka's earnest attempts to please her mother, to outdo 'that woman's child,' showed that just like Shinji, Asuka cared for her parent. That she believed that there was some truth to the Lilim ideal of family caring for each other.

If Kaworu was her brother, and Asuka saw herself as obligated to care about and please family members, then yes, claiming to be her brother was imposing on her, making demands on her. "Your mother's ex-husband is infertile."

"What?" was Asuka's response to the apparent non sequitur.

"Your mother's husband left her because she didn't give him any children, and he wanted to believe that she was the infertile one. The other woman gave him a daughter: he didn't love that woman for herself, he loved her because of the confirmation of his virility." Lilim and their egos, the lengths they would go to for them. "He was the sterile one, so the other woman was only able to have that child because she slept with another man. The woman that man betrayed your mother for betrayed him in turn." What else should he have expected?

"He was too determined to see that daughter's birth as proof that he was capable of fathering children and your mother was to blame for his previous failure to examine other possibilities. Your mother wished to prove that the fault did not lie with herself, but if there was a miscarriage or you came out flawed then it would have been seen as evidence that the fault lay with her and her husband would have told himself that he was right to leave her. So, she decided to use optimal Lilim DNA to produce a flawless child, just as SEELE wanted the child they forced Adam to bear to be physically flawless. It wouldn't do if some defect caused this vessel to die before they had other vessels ready, and Adam's soul returned to what was left of her original body." When that happened, she woke up ahead of schedule and the world ended. Kaworu had seen the aftermath, although obviously he'd been too dead at the time to watch what happened and there weren't any survivors to tell him the details. "We share the same DNA, but it's not because your mother wanted you to be like me. It's because both she and SEELE wanted children born without flaws."

Really, Asuka was right, he realized. Despite the genetic relationship, Dr. Sohryu had never wanted her daughter and the angel she experimented on to be _family_. "I asked her in one timeline if this made you my sister. She made it very clear that if I dared think that way about you, she would make sure I suffered for it."

Since that was one of the earlier timelines, back when he'd lacked things like common sense and basic self-preservation, especially when he was curious, he hadn't shut up about it until Dr. Sohryu demonstrated that she was much better at murdering little angel vessels and getting away with it than Dr. Naoko Akagi, but he didn't think mentioning that would make it easier to get along with Asuka. Then again it might make her happy, that her mother wanted to protect her from the angel trying to get close to her, instead of insulted that he was accusing her mother of premeditated murder.

"Good," she said, although she still frowned at him in case he wanted to try anything funny. "Misato says you still haven't gotten rid of that _baby _room."

Kaworu didn't say that in his eyes, Asuka wasn't all that much older than she was when she approved that room and its contents. True, she had lived more years, but she'd just relived her time as a child. "Shinji forbade me to disassemble it. He wanted it kept that way as a sign of his promise."

"Promise?" she asked suspiciously, hands on her hips with her yellow sundress blowing in the wind. "What promise?"

"That someday, when time can flow onward into the future and what is done must no longer be undone, there would be a child for that room."

"He said something about you adopting?" Asuka frowned, because an angel raising human children?

"No," Kaworu shook his head, although they had adopted before, or rather taken some Lilim in for a few years. Kaworu remembered what a struggle it was to get by in Lilim society with no one who loved him enough to want to teach him to manage. One of the advantages of a perfect memory was that he could keep track of those children. One of the advantages of angel powers was that he could creatively mislay enough of SEELE's funds to fund a school that would take them in. It was hard to spend years with someone, especially a child, and then have them not remember you. "Our children, mine and Shinji's. Someday, we will be able to have children together without them being condemned to share my fate." As an angel he must destroy this world or die himself, until another way was found.

"Your children?" Asuka demanded. "What are you… Oh." So she'd noticed the shapes under Kaworu's shirt. Well, who would know better than an Eva pilot that some angels could change their forms? Even if she had not fought Armisael. "Pervert," she accused him.

"Yes," he, or rather she, agreed happily. "You called me that in my very first lifetime, the first time I met you. I didn't have any idea what you meant, nor did I have any perverted thoughts at the time." He hadn't known that was the women's bathroom, and it wouldn't have meant more to him than 'eww, gross, Lilim bodily functions' if he had. "Then I fell in love with Shinji, and discovered the desire to be close to another. The desire to touch them, to kiss them: the wish for them to live. I hope you experience love someday, Asuka."

Just not with Shinji. Kaworu wasn't very happy that Shinji had let her kiss him in this last timeline, although attraction wasn't the real reason and it wasn't like Shinji remembered at the time that he was married.

"How can I, when I'm not allowed off this island?" she demanded.

"That is Shinji's decision." Kaworu didn't argue with her beloved. "But I'll start setting up false ID and accounts for you. At first Misato wanted to just dump all that data into the hands of the world, and Shinji knew that if he let her off the island she would try. She did try a few days ago. I think what convinced her not to was Shinji throwing up his hands in defeat and telling her to go ahead, if she enjoyed watching innocents get slaughtered. I should have written up summaries of the relevant timelines in advance." Since Kaworu's ability to connect to computer systems meant it was fairly easy for him to transform words in his head into document files, or images into image files. Painting required skill, and photography was about finding the perfect moment. He enjoyed those two art forms (not as much as music or gardening) but even though as a child he enjoyed praise it just wasn't fair to have the Lilim applaud him for how many hours he must have labored over a piece that honestly he'd just seen in a dream and downloaded into photoshop.

It first it was flattering, but then it started to feel as though what they were really praising was his angelic nature. For Lilim, it was an almost impossible task to take the images in their minds and make them real, make them things other Lilim could see and enjoy.

Oh, yes. "Did Misato tell you about the invasion of NERV by the JSDF?"

"Did Misato tell me? I fought them myself! Before those knockoff Evas arrived!"

"My soul was imprisoned in one of those," Kaworu said, looking sadly down at one of the water lilies. "I don't even know which one: the brain was too undeveloped to form memories." It was only the Lilim brain that let Adam's soul truly _think_, and immature ones were dangerous. Two was a dangerous age: he was especially vulnerable then to getting upset either by some memory or how he was treated and wanting to see Shinji _right then_, regardless of what got blown up or if he made Shinji cry by taking him away from his parents when Kaworu couldn't restore Shinji's memories without near certainty of brain damage.

It was because the Fruit of Knowledge was such a great gift that not possessing it, or possessing only an incomplete form, was so annoying, no, crippling. He should appreciate that he had the capacity for thought and culture, but if only he could have it earlier! Before Shinji had to experience wasted years with _them!_

He wasn't going to say that he wished she'd managed to destroy those clones either: that would just have let Adam's soul return to Adam's original body, and when that body was already one with Gendo Ikari's flesh?

"You're a man again," Asuka realized. "And it's too bad you didn't feel me tear them apart."

'Tear them apart' as opposed to 'stab the cores,' but then she'd thought she was dealing with ordinary Evas. Not that there was such a thing as an ordinary Eva, although Unit 00 and Unit 02 were quite weak for beings born of Adam, the way GEHIRN and SEELE intended.

"Shinji enjoys it when I'm female every once in awhile, but a female body is more natural for Adam's soul. A male body is foreign to her, and the degree of compatibility between what is Adam and what is Kaworu affects how easy it is for her to awaken and possess me." Kaworu frowned: he wasn't going to tell Asuka, but it worried him that Adam was awakening sooner in these lives, often only a few days after Armisael fell. In his first life he never even sensed Adam stir in the back of his mind: was he growing more like a seed of life as he matured, instead of a Lilim? "I'm sure that wasn't SEELE's goal when they made this body, however." Kaworu having less time fit their timetable better, if anything.

"So if Adam possesses you, you'll head right for NERV like any other angel?" Where Eva pilots could fight him?

Did Asuka really think that she could kill him, even with an Eva? When he had the soul of Adam, most powerful of the angels? When a disaster that killed billions of people only delayed Adam's awakening for a little over fifteen years? "No. The body in Terminal Dogma is Lilith's, not Adam's, and really any Evangelion will do. Third Impact requires the soul of a seed, the flesh of a seed and the soul of an angel: the angels were seeking Lilith and Adam's souls. Otherwise, Third Impact would have happened the moment any of them touched an Eva."

Kaworu closed his eyes. "When Shinji closed his hand around me in Terminal Dogma? I could have triggered Third Impact then. Unit 01 was just as much Lilith's flesh as the body on the cross, and Shinji's soul… Is truly beautiful. Adam would prefer to merge with one of her children instead of one of the monsters that raped her in order to bring about my birth, but if they are already dead then she will take Shinji's soul." Ah, yes, this jealous protective rage. Even though Adam shared his soul, even though he was the interloper, the one without a right to exist, for her to take Shinji, Kaworu's Shinji? That bright glimmering soul?

Mmm, he shouldn't be thinking of Shinji when he was dealing with Asuka. Or gardening. Or getting anything at all done other than waiting for Shinji to return and dreaming of what would happen when he did.

To see Shinji again, see his smile, give him happiness and pleasure… That was his goal in every lifetime, even if now part of it was to never have to say goodbye to Shinji. He wanted to save the rest of the Lilim too, of course. They were worthy of existence, but Shinji was worthy of love.

"And if Shinji's dead?" Asuka asked.

"I do not know. Shinji has been killed before me a few times." Lilim were so fragile. "Once he is dead, it becomes impossible to kill me before Adam takes over. She must have done something, but when I awoke, there was no one left to tell me."

"Impossible to kill you? You must be joking!"

"I am not," he said, meeting her furious blue eyes. "The prophecies state that I will die for Shinji's sake. I have tried to kill myself so he doesn't have to kill me, but even though I can lower my AT field and disable my healing factor if I focus on the effort, once I pass out my will can no longer keep my body from repairing itself. I can destroy my brain, which destroys the personality which holds Adam at bay, but my body will still repair itself. Except for the scars, of course. Lilim bodies produce scars so that an area that is damaged will be better protected against further damage." He turned a wrist so she could see the inside of it. Unmarked. For now. "You may have noticed that Shinji keeps close track of the kitchen knives. He always does: it's not because of you or Misato. It's not even because he is very protective of his cooking tools."

He looked down at his wrist. "Even if it's for his sake, if I'm not in his presence and the presence of the flesh of either Adam or Lilith, I cannot die. But my death would at least buy this world a little time, even if that is the time Gendo Ikari and SEELE need to make their moves. Last timeline, I tried very hard to find some way to avoid Shinji having to kill me. When I met him again, it took some effort to make sure that he wouldn't see my wrists." He frowned. "And of course he noticed that I'd done that almost as soon as he got his memories back this timeline. He says that if I have to die, at least I should die at his hands."

"So he can have the satisfaction of killing you?"

He tried not to laugh: Asuka wouldn't like the possibility that she was being laughed at. "No, because it's lonely otherwise. Dying at his hands, because he wants to give me mercy, wants to save me from my fate of destroying this world: even if it just delivers this soul into SEELE's hands, at least he tried. It means more to me than you can know." That Shinji was willing to touch him, and when Shinji pleaded for him to live? There was so much more to being loved than that, but it was the first proof SEELE's Child had ever been given that he was loved. That someone cared about _him_, not just the angel, even enough to grant just a single request.

"In my first life, he wrapped both of his hands around me before he killed me." The Eva's giant hands, and Kaworu's body was so small by comparison. "I thought for a moment that he was trying to capture me, to shut me up so he didn't have to kill me. That he was trying to get out of granting my request, make me shut up and let NERV or SEELE kill me themselves." Cruel men who wouldn't care for him at all, would just hold him in contempt for not going through with it. "But it was… calming, somehow. A warm feeling, that made me trust him. I didn't realize until I experienced that feeling again," much, much later, "that this was what it was to be held." To be embraced, sheltered from the world.

"What kind of pathetic person wants what?" Asuka asked, tapping her foot.

Even though she was not far removed from childhood herself at all, so she should know. "My mother was forced to bear me and my father's identity is one of SEELE's most closely held secrets: you had a mother who loved you, Asuka." Of course, the matter of why and how Dr. Sohryu loved her designer child… "Not all of us were so fortunate."

He could have said that she was a child blessed by fate and deliberately given good genes, so her intelligence was not her own doing, even though that would mostly be a lie. He could have torn her apart with words: he'd inherited Arael's tactical data from the destruction of Asuka's mind many times over. It would be petty to do that now, but a weapon was a weapon: wasn't that the Lilim way? They were willing to use even the Evas, even the flesh of their enemy, in order to survive and bring ruin upon their enemies.

And upon themselves.

"I think it would help," he told her, "if you thought of this Shinji as someone distinct from the Shinji you knew." Even if he was still that boy inside, that pained boy who felt the pain of others so keenly that he would curl up to try to protect himself from it. "People change as they grow up: sometimes we discover that the approach to life we learned in childhood was created in warped circumstances," like SEELE's tubes. "You are treating Shinji like a fourteen-year old when he is centuries old: consider how insulted you would be if everyone around you treated you like a two-year-old."

He reminded her that, "If you take SEELE lightly they will find you and have you dealt with the way they did Kaji. Don't assume that if the Shinji you knew can evade them, you can too: even Kaji severely underestimated how much they knew of his activities. You will have to become better than he was at espionage if you want to involve yourself in their affairs without being found out. They aren't hunting for the missing Children here the way they are in most timelines, but that's because they don't know any of us are missing yet."

The Tabris clone they believed held the soul of Adam did not deign to speak to mere Lilim. Young Shinji had wandered into the path of a car and was still in a coma, with no one bothering to visit him. If anything, his father's relatives were happy they didn't have to deal with his burden and Gendo was secure in the belief that either Shinji would wake up in time to fulfill his prophesized role or he could just have him turned into a dummy plug, which would let Gendo control Yui in battle instead of having to rely on that parasite who took Yui's attention from him.

SEELE was happy that solitary confinement had driven Misato into full catatonia, since it meant she couldn't reveal the truth. As for Asuka, she had made the mistake of trying to take that doll away from the crazed Dr. Sohryu. The fatal mistake.

So Dr. Sohryu's soul had been removed from Unit 02, and the other woman's child hailed as the Second Child.

Which meant that an accident was arranged for the other woman so her soul could be loaded into the Eva instead, but Kaworu didn't think that would make Asuka feel any better about finding out that she no longer had an Eva to pilot, that it was too late to see her mother again in this timeline. Kaworu would have preferred to incapacitate the replacement 'Asuka' in some fashion, but Shinji was right: if SEELE and NERV were still holding a place open for Asuka in their scenarios, then she would be tempted to declare herself the real Asuka and step into that place. Use her foreknowledge of what the angels would do and her realization of how to draw out the true power of the Eva to become the greatest of the pilots.

Kaworu really hoped Asuka didn't enquire too closely into the details of what her own mother had done to the false Asuka that took her doll. Well, either way, she had believed the doll was her real daughter, not the red-headed child. Did it really make a difference that the child she'd hurt this time wore Asuka's face instead of Kaworu's, when Dr. Sohryu hadn't meant to treat her real daughter like that either way?

It might make a difference to Asuka. How easy it was to provoke Dr. Sohryu to harm a child. Especially when this might be an act born of madness, but the willingness to attack a child and the knowledge of how to use a knife on living flesh were things born from experience.

From dealing with an angel child of whom she was deeply afraid, for herself and her world. What Lilim feared they tried to destroy, and a Lilim who lived in fear tried to inflict that fear on others, knowing it was a potent weapon.

After all, if Kaworu wasn't trained out of the habit of reflexively raising his AT field when something happened that he perceived as an attack, then he couldn't be allowed outside. Ever. He'd give himself away. So, before he could be sent to NERV, before he could breathe free air, SEELE would need proof that he could endure attack without trying to defend himself.

Her inability to draw responses like fear or pain out of the seemingly-stoic clone Kaworu left behind in his place just made her more vicious, because what kind of creature could ignore attacks meant to wound, and wound deeply? Treat them as things of absolutely no consequence that weren't even worth opening its eyes?

A creature that could heal those wounds before more than a few drops of blood fell to the floor. A creature that no Lilim could defeat: so said the prophecies.

If her daughter was deployed to even stall Tabris' assault on Terminal Dogma, then her daughter would die. Especially after she'd spent years giving Tabris reason to hate the woman who bore Asuka.

"You think I'll screw up, don't you?" she accused him, and it was clear that she would have moved to slap him if she wasn't a seasoned enough warrior to have taken his earlier advice to heart. A failed attack would just make her look like a fool, and Asuka would not tolerate imperfection in herself or her actions.

"I think that you and Misato are both very determined, very good people, but both SEELE and Gendo Ikari are very determined themselves. SEELE sees their plan as the only way to save this world, and Gendo Ikari fights for love. They are both also very skilled at using others' goodness against them. Shinji, in every incarnation, knows that he would make a terrible Eva pilot. He lacks your training. So Gendo Ikari shows him Rei, and tells him what amounts to 'this girl will die unless you go out and die in her place.' Because Shinji does not have the strength to win that battle, and that is what Gendo is counting on. That Shinji's pain and panic will allow Yui Ikari to seize control. You and Misato are very… hands-on people. I do not think you have it in you to remain at a safe distance and observe when the fate of the world is at stake."

He remembered Misato watching him through her binoculars, which would have been perfectly safe, a perfectly wise way to go about it if it weren't for the fact that he was an angel, and she was ignorant of the true nature of the AT field. She might as well have trained spotlights on him as expect him not to notice the heat of her regard. Then as now, what they thought was a safe distance wouldn't be. "You are warriors. They are assassins. The only way I have found to learn how to survive people like that, whose minds leap to tactics that decent people would consider evil and unthinkable, is trial and error. Lots of error." Especially in his case.

"Part of Shinji's wish is to keep you safe," as little as Asuka wanted to hear that, "but the only way for you to be safe is for you to learn how to defend yourself." She wasn't going to want to listen to them when they told her that she was weak, that she couldn't manage. Not until SEELE had bloodied her nose for her a few times: then she would want to learn every tactic and strategy Shinji knew for how to overcome them.

Freedom was worth dying for, but unfortunately for them all freedom came with the freedom to screw up and die trying.

Encroaching on Misato and Asuka the way Armisael had encroached on Rei, Kaworu and their Evas in the first timeline would let him archive their memories as they happened. Right up to the moment of death.

He should wish them long lives, but if they made it to the year the angels attacked then either NERV would fall to one of the angels, making them more determined to try to help NERV and likely to play into Gendo Ikari's hands in the next timeline, or NERV would defeat all the other angels, Shinji would refuse to kill Kaworu and the inevitable would happen once again.

The two of them didn't look on him kindly as it was. If they watched him, or what used to be him attack NERV and destroy the world?

Oh, Shinji might say it was Adam's fault, not Kaworu's, but when billions of people died then it didn't matter whose fault it was. The dead were dead and deserved justice. Atonement, not excuses.

All Kaworu could do was revive the world.

If only it would stay that way. If only someday he could make his apologies to the no-longer-dead for the last time, and be free of that blood-guilt forevermore.

* * *

"Look," Shinji said, glad he'd decided to have this conversation when Kaworu wasn't present, "This is how it works. Do you _really _want him picking and choosing what memories he gives you next life? But if you don't upload it to him, he can't download it back into the next you. And 'regular downloads,'" letting Kaworu copy their memories on a schedule the way Misato suggested, "mean that if you do something that gets you killed, next time you won't remember what you did. Or any interesting stuff they spilled while interrogating you since obviously you'd be too dead afterwards to use that information. The only reason he's not encroached into me right now, or last timeline, is that last timeline I was getting hooked up to part of Lilith's body," when he piloted Unit 01, "and this timeline I'm guarding Adam's. So it's just not safe."

Asuka and Misato already understood the 'seed's soul plus angel's soul plus seed's flesh equals Third Impact' equation, so they couldn't argue with him there.

"Would you rather have everything up until you die, or be cut off after the last point you managed to meet up with him to save your progress? If you don't have the autosave function, even if you have a recent save, you're still going to have to miss the cutscenes before the last boss battle." Shinji decided to stop the metaphor before he brought up quicktime events they wouldn't remember and thus be prepared for. "Take it or leave it, but you guys need to accept the fact that this is _not _going to be the last timeline. It's not just a matter of stopping my bastard father and SEELE, there's the problem with Lilith running out of new souls, and… Even Kaworu and I don't have any idea how to save this planet. So we need to figure out how. SEELE and Gendo aren't the biggest threats to humanity, they're just the most annoying ones since they can think and adapt. So we need to figure out how to solve the underlying problems, and how to stop them from stopping us from solving the underlying problems. Just getting in the Evas and fighting angels won't save the world." The Evas were nothing but giant doomsday devices. Giant traps.

Just like Tokyo-3, like, well, everything.

Well, he'd warned them. "Let us know how you want to handle this by the day after tomorrow. We're going to pack this place up and make some new cover identities so we don't have SEELE knocking down our door once they capture and interrogate you."

Shinji was thinking a rock band. Starting a rock band kept the two of them nicely insanely busy and surrounded by people, so it would be easier for Shinji to relax and not stress too much about what Misato and Asuka were doing.

Getting captured, helping Gendo level up, getting tortured to death… He knew he'd see them again next timeline, but he was worried about them. If they were hurt now they'd remember it next time, too.

He wanted to say he'd changed his mind and forbid them to go, but that just wasn't right. Kaworu was right, Shinji hated it when people imprisoned him like that. They were people, not just parts of a possible think tank for figuring out how to save the world so Shinji could get what he wanted…

Oh. This was what he'd felt last timeline, when they were two of the closest people he had.

When he'd thought that if they died, they'd stay dead.

This was wanting to protect someone, the way he'd felt when Gendo hauled out Rei and told him to pilot or this girl would die.

He didn't want to feel that way. It hurt. So many times over he'd failed to protect them. His precious people kept dying on him. That was why he'd rejected Kaworu in the first life. If he didn't care anymore, then it wouldn't hurt anymore. That was what he'd wanted to believe.

So he'd tried to tell himself that he didn't care about Kaworu. Like he'd tried to tell himself now that the only things he felt for Misato and Asuka were annoyance and anger. They were jerks, like Kaworu was weird.

But that… was a lie, wasn't it?

Something he was telling himself to make it stop hurting.

Because Kaworu was right, and even now his heart broke _so easily_. So all he could do was tell himself that it would be alright, they'd be alive again next timeline. That it didn't matter, they would all be fine, everyone would be fine.

As long as the reboots continued, he could see everyone again anytime he wanted. He wouldn't lose anyone permanently. Everything would be okay. It didn't matter if Arael got her hands on Asuka again, Asuka would be fine. She'd wake up and be back to herself and everyone else, too, would be okay.

He hadn't hardened his heart. Not at all. Kaworu was right. He'd lied to himself to try to protect that heart. Because he couldn't stand it when the people he cared about were in danger. When the people he cared about were hurting. He tried to tell himself he didn't care about Misato and Asuka, but that was just as transparent and cruel a lie as when he'd rejected Kaworu on that beach.

Being such a jerk, trying to push them away to protect himself… Was he acting like his father? No: Gendo had never cared for Shinji. He'd thrown Shinji away to spare himself bother, not pain.

But Shinji was still throwing people away. And it still hurt them no matter why he did it. Just like he'd broken Kaworu's heart on that beach and made him want nothing more than to die.

"I'm sorry I've been such a jerk to you guys," he said, looking shamefully away to the side. That was what mattered, that he'd been a jerk. Hurting someone else, just to protect himself? No, hurting people he cared about and telling himself that it didn't matter for any reason? "I've been really terrible to Kaworu too, but I'll probably keep being a jerk. It's not easy to change, but Kaworu did it, so… I wanted people to like me… No, I wanted to be someone that people would like, but I didn't think that was possible." Otherwise, his parents would have liked him. There must be something wrong with him that they hadn't. "I'll try to be a little more mature when we see each other again."

That was when he ran away, because he never had learned to be brave, hadn't he? It was easy to take chances when there wouldn't be any consequences. Was that all he'd been doing all this time, running away from his feelings?


	5. Light of the Soul

_This is one of those fics that demonstrates that I have no control over what I write anymore: the original premise was manga!Kaworu trying and repeatedly failing epically, as I've said, then it shifted to Kaworu and Shinji in the period between when Kaworu figured out how to make this work and when he decided that he actually did kind of want to save the Lilim, then it would have been the transition to trying to save the world and all the ways that went hilariously wrong and then it got hijacked by Shinji and his issues. Part of the reason I wanted to have it be something episodic is that the grand conflict in Eva has not been resolved, the world has not been saved, and I wanted the fic to be about the process, not the end result._

_About finding happiness in the process, loving the journey, instead of the reboots being an entirely tragic thing. Unfortunately the tragedy of it managed to creep into the fic via Shinji. Well, having people around who are not Kaworu and will call him on it when he acts like a jerk will help. Here is the final chapter, and a reason why Kaworu is too grateful to Shinji to ever call him on anything. Why he still feels that he doesn't really have the right._

* * *

"It's three in the morning," Shinji said, too weary to have any irritation to suppress, looking up at the clock on the wall. It was probably a mercy that Kaworu and Ritsuko's equipment made enough noise to keep the 'tick, tock' from echoing, from reminding them every second that time was an hourglass. Slipping by. Counting down. "It's always three in the morning. It has something to do with human biorhythms: our bodies are weakest right around now. This is the real Witching Hour, the time when hospitals lose a lot of their patients."

Kaworu whimpered, cheek pressed into the palm of Shinji's gloved hand as the other stroked hair that had never looked so much like the color of bone. The color of death. He pressed pale lips against that glove, nuzzling it, and in the dim room it was possible to see that Shinji's hand was glowing. The light of an AT field.

Keeping the angel away from Adam's flesh.

"Please," Kaworu said with a small, breathy voice, not quite a whisper. He shuddered a little, weakly, and choked back another whimper.

"Kaworu, you know better than to ask me this, right?" Shinji sounded too exhausted to say it sternly or even flippantly.

Eyes closed the angel ignored him, pushing his lips against the barrier of Shinji's soul with his mouth open. Not like the many kisses they'd seen him give Shinji. Mouth open, a hungry babe trying to reach their mother's flesh.

Adam's flesh.

Begging Shinji to let him cause Third Impact: that was what they would have thought, if they hadn't heard this same exchange a dozen times since Shinji called them here to see this, so they'd understand.

Called them here because they were sort of friends now, and he clearly needed the support, hair unkempt and face covered in stubble. If he was wearing glasses…

"Please, Shinji, beloved." Kaworu drew in a shuddering breath. "Please, please don't let me, don't make me." Because soon he wouldn't have any choice.

"Kaworu…" There was no begging in Shinji's voice, but only because he knew that begging Kaworu wouldn't help, and there was no other god to answer.

"Please kill me." Kaworu panted, light, shallow breaths, not because he needed the oxygen but because of his Lilim body, his vessel trying to gather itself to fight off whatever was making it sick. But this was no illness Lilim were meant to experience.

Or was it arousal that rendered him feverish, body responding to alien instincts, alien drives? This was the first time any of them saw sweat on Kaworu's brow, saw him look delicate and frail. "Please, your hands…" He arched the back of his neck, nudging forward a little to try to get the hand that was stroking his hair to touch his neck, the elegant curve of his spine. "I want…"

"If I…" Shinji swallowed. "If I kill you, they'll just trigger instrumentality themselves, or Adam's soul will find another vessel…"

"If… Oh, Shinji…" Regret in Kaworu's voice, but only for an instant. "My wish, my only freedom: please. Please, beloved."

"But you're free now, free to be with me," Shinji said, but there was more than a trace of despair in his voice as he looked down at Kaworu, eyes glowing red as he called up the power of Adam's flesh to summon that AT field and keep its original soul from returning to it. "Don't you have your own wishes now? Haven't I granted as many of them as I can?" So please don't ask this of me.

Please, Kaworu.

"Shinji, beloved, please don't make me kill you," the angel said, opening his eyes to look up at Shinji. Half-lidded and red around the edges with exhaustion, they looked more like a rabbit's eyes than anything that could kill.

Kaji was the only one who thought of the killer rabbit. All the other angels were giants or infections: strange and powerful creatures, but the most powerful of them all was created in the form of a boy. The angel Lilim, weakest and most easily squished of the lot, was Legion. Was made up of a horde of billions that could force the flesh of Adam and Lilith to lend them the power they lacked. Then there was this… No, not a kid anymore: he looked Kaji's age right now and he had who knew how many thousands of years of experience, even if a lot of it was the same fifteen years over and over.

Either Shinji killed Kaworu or, from what Kaji had gathered, the angel was going to kill him. All having part of Adam in his body did was let Shinji project his own AT field, just like the human souls in the Evas made from those things. It didn't make his soul or AT field any stronger.

Kaworu was the one with Adam's soul, and Second Impact was really just a fraction of that thing's power. Kaworu's body was already trying to reach Shinji's to initiate Third Impact. The instant Kaworu lost control of his soul as well? Shinji's AT field wouldn't even slow him down.

The angel was already glowing with unfocused power that he couldn't suppress. The light of the soul. The sword and shield of the angels and Evas.

A glance over at Ritsuko saw her lighting another cigarette as she eyed her equipment. The rest of them were here to be in at the death (only question was whose), but she had science to do.

The only one who wasn't here was Asuka, who declared that she'd had enough of the two of them arguing about who killed who so whoever got to be the one without blood on their hands, told Shinji to flip a goddamn coin and stalked out to the guesthouse that morning.

Honestly, Kaji was hoping that Shinji would just do it. He wanted to see what would happen next for himself, see what he could dig up in SEELE's files while they were focused on the ritual. Who cared about computer security anymore when they were about to become gods?

Leaning against the wall next to him, Misato looked thoroughly disgruntled. The words 'Just kill the angel already and get it over with" were probably on the tip of her tongue, but they both knew that if they passed her lips Shinji would be furious with her and would absolutely refuse to kill Kaworu, especially since Shinji had made some resolution about not taking advantage of the fact people would come back too much anymore, or something like that, before Kaji got his memories back. Personally, he was going to take as much advantage of it as he could, but it wasn't like he was married. If he died early in a reset, Misato could manage the rest of it perfectly fine without him.

This was a heck of a tragic moment, but reminding themselves that they would probably all come back and the two lovebirds would be reunited made it a lot easier to keep from tearing up. Misato and Asuka weren't the only ones taking refuge in the 'will you two get on with it already' mindset. Because this still was a horrible thing to watch, knowing what the two of them were going through – No, knowing even a fraction of it. It wasn't just that Kaworu was an angel and all Kaji could compare this to was trying to quit smoking, his body demanding something he knew damn well would kill him if he lived that long. It was the depth of the relationship between those two, and the knowledge that they'd gone through this _over and over and over_ and at first Shinji had tried to say, "Oh, it's just this again," before he took a deep breath and let the façade crumble. Stopped lying to himself.

The look in Kaworu's eyes changed from tired desperation to _desire_, looking up into Shinji's, and suddenly the angel looked like sex. None of them could keep themselves from taking a step forward.

It was the crash as Ritsuko hit her equipment that jarred them out of it. Ritsuko cursed under her breath as Shinji swallowed, because the field around his hand had come _that close _to flickering out. So _that _was the call that made the angels try to fight their way to Terminal Dogma.

Huh.

"I, I don't have much time left," Kaworu knew, looking even more apologetic, as though it was his fault he couldn't hold out forever. "Shinji, please, I… I want to die by your hands, like back then. It isn't just that I hate destroying the Lilim: I _want this_, Shinji."

"Kaworu…"

"The only freedom I ever truly had back then… was the freedom to choose the means of my own death," Kaworu smiled, and it was all the more terrible for being simply a fond, nostalgic smile. How could someone genuinely smile over something like that? How could assisted suicide be like, like their first date? The thing someone reminisced about, as though it was the most perfect moment in their relationship? What they wanted it to be like? "My last request. I thought you hated me, and would refuse me because of that, but… if you ever cared for me at all…"

No darkness or threat in those last words, no emotion besides that overwhelming love and need and yet Shinji's movement was almost convulsive.

"The proof of your love," the angel murmured, eyes sliding shut again now that Shinji's hands were around his throat. A perfect marble saint, a perfect martyr. Such a willing sacrifice.

"I _hate _this," Shinji said, once it was over, once the light had died. "I, I hate this." Curling around Kaworu's body, that precious head of silver tucked under his chin. "I'll see him again," he whispered to himself, cradling that white-clad body. "I'll see him again, I know it…"

* * *

"So, what did all of you do last timeline _while I was fighting off all the angels by myself_?" Asuka didn't sound resentful at all, but more like there had better be some appreciation of how much ass she'd kicked forthcoming or she'd just have to kick some more asses.

"I bred a prize-winning variety of melons," Kaji said happily, patting the fluffy white one-eyed tomcat he'd trained to sit on his lap so he could outdo Gendo's evil mastermind look. "I named them Misatos."

"I managed not to murder my husband," Misato said under her breath. "Seriously, though, Kaji and I worked on nailing down the details of how deeply the UN is penetrated and how that penetration is accomplished over time. Ritsuko, Maya and Kaworu worked on practicing his terraforming, seeing how far they could push his ability to change LCL into usable biomass over a large area without waking up Adam or ending up with life incompatible with Lilith-based life." When Adam-based life tended to be very hardy, very fast-spreading and very poisonous.

Why, it was almost as though Adam didn't like the Lilim.

Misato didn't specify that since they were working on control over a large area as opposed to the production of actual life forms, they'd knocked off after Kaworu turned a lake of LCL into beer (and then back into LCL, for the sake of not attracting worldwide attention). It bugged her a little to tweak Second Impact to destroy _more _of Earth and its biosphere so they had large amounts of LCL to practice with, but so far the _only _successful Third Impact scenario, the only one humanity could come back from, meant they needed a way to fix up their planet afterwards. Get all the people out of the LCL, confine some LCL somewhere so people could keep coming back from it if they died again, and turn the rest of the planet green and blue and gold again. Amber waves of grain that could be made into waves of amber beer.

Anyway, doing too much training in any one timeline ran the risk of Adam waking up, going looking for an angel and ending everything ahead of schedule, so baby steps. Having a ratio of ten or so usable years to four or so unusable was already bad enough, but after seeing a few timelines end very badly when Kaworu overestimated how much he could trust his abilities or how far he could push things before Adam took over, she was willing to trust his judgment if he said that altering people's brains before that point was _just not safe_. He was the one who had to spend those years floating in a tube, bored out of his skull and knowing that there was potentially something he could do about this, so she was pretty sure he wouldn't subject himself to that unless he had to, or at least thought he had to do it.

Ritsuko was working on neurologic theory and how the maturation of a Lilim brain could be speeded up when it was already pretty damn fast during infancy, both to increase their efficiency (the number of usable years between Second and Third impacts) and because the sooner she got her memories back the sooner she could sabotage Gendo and her mother's relationship so they broke up and her mother found someone better, or at least someone who didn't make Ritsuko feel nauseous.

"So, Rei still can't do it, huh?"

Misato shook her head. "Either she's just too old or it's the wrong stage in their life cycle." Lilith was supposed to be blooming now. Leaving earth once humanity's time was ended and they went extinct due to lack of souls, not wasting energy terraforming a planet when soon there would be no one to inhabit it.

"So Rei can't make living things, while Kaworu can make living things, but most of them would rather kill Lilim than play nice with the rest of the ecosystem. This is going to take awhile, not that I'm complaining," Kaji said, looking mellow.

Apparently gardening was good for relaxation and blood pressure, but Kaji had decided to take his garden plot and Kaworu's lessons and apply them to things like the flesh-colored Misato's Melons and winning competitions for largest (insert vegetable, preferably phallic, here). Misato was just glad Ritsuko had taken it upon herself to get revenge. Misato didn't know exactly what she'd done to Kaji, but lolcats were involved somehow.

She had to wonder if Shinji and Kaworu had ever had a prankster period. Probably, if that thing about invading Keel's mansion dressed like the Spanish Inquisition (not that Shinji was aware they were cosplaying at the time) was true. Misato wasn't really sure whether or not she was sorry she'd missed that, but her two college friends were really throwing themselves into it, and there was only so much Maya and Misato could do to keep them under control. Especially when half the time, Misato was tipsily egging them on.

Kaji did have a point that pulling off pranks was practice for doing things to people that they didn't want you to do, and it was better for SEELE and NERV to get hit with pranks than to get hit with real assaults. If people were carrying feelings over between timelines, then better for them to expect minor, harmless annoyances than serious attack, while Kaji and Misato practiced physical ops and Ritsuko and Maya learned how to hack first the computers they had at earlier points in the timeline and then the knockoff Magi systems.

They were getting there. It was taking awhile, but they were getting there. Once Kaworu got the terraforming thing down, they should be ready to take another shot at it.

* * *

"What were you thinking? What the hell were you thinking?!" Misato demanded, very close to grabbing and throttling Shinji except Kaworu was giving her a _look _over Shinji's shoulder.

Due to remembering his own embarrassing younger days, Kaworu was a very forgiving person, but Shinji had just spent the last timeline being miserable and Misato _hadn't helped_. Not that this was her fault, when she hadn't remembered either, but there was logic and there was 'the person I love more than all the worlds and time was just so insanely miserable that he flipped out and triggered a Fourth Impact."

Shinji held up his hand. "First off, I wasn't." Thinking. He'd been out of his damn mind. "Second, I stand by my decision. Flipped-out me made the right call."

"But we were so close? So damn close! If you just listened to Kaworu and aborted the mission, we could have taken you back to our base, and…"

"And made another run at it after finding the Spear of Cassius?" Shinji snorted. "You seriously think _Gendo Ikari_ would have let us have another chance at fixing the world? When that would mean Yui wouldn't get to become God? That was our one shot! Even if it had a one in a million chance of working without the spear, well, we can afford to take those million shots at it! And a one in a million chance is better than the zero percent chance we would have had if Gendo realized we weren't following his scenario and had time to plan something else to screw us up! He only let us get that close in the first place because he needed some pretty convincing bait for his trap to kill Kaworu so Kaworu couldn't keep sabotaging his _other _plans!" He shook his head.

"No. Flipped-out me knew this was his only chance to fix the world, and he was right. If it had worked, you would all be calling him a gutsy genius right now, and you know it. I know you're all frustrated that we got so close and didn't succeed, but my father let us get that close. Gendo Ikari _let _us get that close to winning. Think about that for a minute."

"He let you put him in check so he could get Kaworu in checkmate?" Kaji guessed. He didn't know what they were talking about, having been dead at the time and all, but that was what it sounded like.

He was just really hoping Kaworu hadn't noticed that time Kaji flirted with Shinji. Kaworu was used to Asuka doing it, but she was his sister. There was Misato, but it wasn't like she was serious. This was the first time Kaji had hit on Shinji, and even though he'd just done it to make the cute little girly-looking thing blush, there was that whole 'cute little girly-looking thing' part of the thought process. When that was the godlike alien's cute little girly-looking thing.

Shinji might have that 'seed-magnet' thing going on, and Asuka was used to being a genius without equals in her peers so she usually let herself hope that she might have found an equal who wasn't ten years older than her in Shinji. Other than that, Kaworu had surprisingly little competition for someone who was a giant robot pilot and a world hero. Except in that last timeline.

Kaji might have winced on Shinji's behalf, except it basically always sucked to be Shinji in timelines where he couldn't remember. He couldn't pilot if he remembered, otherwise the ghost in Unit 01 would get access to those memories and that ended horribly.

He winced, remembering one of Shinji's memories that was important enough to get copied over to the rest of them. "_So, you managed to seduce a god into being your adoring slave. It seems you truly are my son._

"_That makes you _competition_." _And those words were the last Shinji knew before the Eva destroyed his frontal lobes doing something that made Ritsuko and Maya excited in the way scientists got over the really nasty things that shouldn't be possible in a universe that wasn't actively out to get people. He would have spent the rest of that timeline as a dummy plug if he wasn't supposed to meet up with Kaworu. What exactly Kaworu did when he found out that his love was dead, killed by his own mother, wasn't in the memories, but that was the fifth timeline in Shinji's memories, when he'd wanted to try to do it over. Get it right. When he thought this world was worth saving and it was Kaworu who had to be forced into going along with that. It took that many timelines for Shinji to wear him down into giving Shinji a chance, and it ended that badly?

Yui Ikari's pawn was Gendo, or rather Gendo was her Queen. Shinji's was Kaworu. Backstabbing cleverness and foresight versus power and immortality. Black seed vs. white. Stalemate, so far. No one had been able to get what they wanted and keep it so far, but if Yui actually had become a god multiple times, when _any _other members of humanity had managed to survive Third Impact only twice now, she was certainly in the lead…

But as for how long she'd stay there?

"Hey, it does sound like you guys came pretty close. I think that calls for some shots, what do you say?"

"Speaking of shots," Misato said, turning her disapproving gaze from Shinji to him. "I thought you said you were going to work on your tendency to get killed uselessly?"

Crap.

* * *

_The booklet for my DVD set of I think Rebuild 1.11 says 'Eva is a story about dealing with things that happen over and over' or words to that effect. __Foreshadowing the Reboots thing._

_The world of Eva is not an easy one to save. _Nosgoth_ levels of having to be dragged kicking and screaming to salvation, everyone fighting you every step of the way. _

_Ah, Legacy of Kain._

_Misato reflects on the Evas in the series, how humanity even uses things like them to survive. Because it has to, if it wants to survive. Shinji might be making an effort to be kindler and gentler, but Misato is a soldier, Ritsuko is a scientist and Kaji is Kaji. They need intel, they need knowledge in order to have a chance to save this world, so they're going to do whatever it takes. The reboots and the situation would force a necessary degree of callousness on anyone… Except Kaworu. Humans are bastards, but he was intended to be a superhumanly good person. At least he's much better at being Shinji's morality pet than Rei is at being Gendo's in Rebuild…_


End file.
